Black Henry explores the profound consequences of a clash of cultures, when in 1521 Ferdinand Magellan and three Spanish ships make landfall in the Philippines. His Malay slave, Enrique, acts as the go-between the conquistadors and the islanders. However, Magellan’s disastrous attempt to colonize the islands not only complicates Enrique’s life but alters irrevocably the character and destiny of the archipelago.
Black Henry virtually premiered live on Sunday, April 25th, 2021, 6:30 pm (EDT) and was followed by a talkback with Luis H. Francia (playwright), Claro de los Reyes (stage director), and Nerissa Balce (SUNY Stony Brook’s Department of Asian and Asian American Studies).
A second live virtual performance took place on Monday, April 26th, 2021, 6:30 pm (EDT), and a recording of this performance was broadcast on Tuesday, April 27th, 2021, 6:30pm (EDT).
Co-sponsored by NYU Sulo: the Philippine Studies Initiative and NYU King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC) and Atlantic Pacific Theatre.
About the Playwright
Luis H. Francia is a poet, nonfiction writer, and playwright. In addition to the forthcoming Thorn Grass, his poetry books include Tattered Boat (2014), The Beauty of Ghosts (2010), and Museum of Absences (2005). He is a Palanca Prize winner in poetry, Manila’s prestigious literary awards body.
He edited Brown River, White Ocean: A Twentieth Century Anthology of Philippine Literature in English (Rutgers University Press, 1993); co-edited, with Eric Gamalinda, the literary anthology, Flippin’: Filipinos on America (Asian American Writers Workshop, 1996); and, with Angel Velasco Shaw, Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999 (New York University Press, 2002).
His memoir, Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago was awarded both New York’s 2002 PEN Open Book and the Asian American Writers literary awards. In 2016, his RE: Reviews, Recollections, Reflections (2015), was awarded Manila’s National Book Award for Best Essays in English. He is included in the Library of America’s Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing.
His first full-length play, on the absurdities of dictatorial rule, The Strange Case of Citizen de la Cruz, was given its world premiere by Bindlestiff Studio in San Francisco in 2012. Black Henry is his second full-length play.
He is an adjunct professor of Filipino Language and Culture at New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and Co-Director of Sulo: the Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU. He and his wife–Midori Yamamura, an art historian and professor–live in Jackson Heights, Queens.
About the Creative Team
Stage Director: Claro de los Reyes
Claro de los Reyes (he/him/his) is NYC-based playwright, actor, educator, and a social practice theatre artist. His theatre works aim to raise questions about transnational histories and its intimate influence on the present. As an actor he has performed with NY theater companies that include NAATCO, Pan Asian Rep, Leviathan Lab, and International WOW. As a theatre maker he has had the honor of co-creating theatre alongside community members in NYC, Minnesota, the Philippines, and Rwanda. Recent accomplishments include: The Laundromat Project Create Change artist commission; National Artists Strategies Creative Community Fellow; Downtown Art Artist-in-Residence; Epic Theatre Ensemble’s Spotlight Playwriting Commission.
Claro is the founder and director of Atlantic Pacific Theatre (APT), a theater company committed to exploring cross-cultural exchange and pluralism. www.atlanticpacifictheatre.org. Up Next: Claro and APT have received an LP Creative Action Fund commission and are currently producing a new short play series called “Island Table Series: A Play Festival Presenting a Menu of Short Plays Inspired by Global Cuisine and History” which will be presented this May 2021.
Cinematography: Charles Reynoso
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Charles Reynoso has been an educator, musician, and filmmaker for over two decades. As a teacher with the Department of Education, he and his history students created short films with historical narratives to connect modern-day injustices and inequalities to American history. As a media producer, he collaborated with several non-profit organizations to bring awareness to issues surrounding the AfroLatino community. Now as Manager of Education and Curriculum Development at Reelworks Teen Filmmaking, he helps develop the next generation of young filmmakers to diversify voices in the media industry and continue the fight against inequality. |
Graphics: Francis Estrada
| Born in the Philippines and currently residing in Brooklyn, Francis Estrada is a visual artist and educator who has a fine arts degree in painting and drawing. He is a museum educator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and a freelance educator of Filipino cultural and martial arts. In his artwork, Estrada interrogates how visual cues found in historical photographs, mass media, political propaganda, and personal archives influence or inflect social or cultural narratives. |  |
Costumes: Cynthia Alberto
Cynthia Alberto is an artist, designer, and founder of the Brooklyn-based Weaving and Healing arts studio Weaving Hand, Cynthia Alberto seeks to bridge traditional and contemporary weaving techniques, drawing inspiration from ancient communities of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Her artwork, performances, and public weaving projects honor traditional and artisanal techniques while also incorporating unconventional materials and a zero-waste philosophy. Throughout her artwork and teaching, Alberto continuously explores the many intersections between weaving and healing, as well as craft and sustainability.
Inspired by her studio practice and teaching, Cynthia continuously explores diverse relationships between weaving, healing, inclusive art, craft, and sustainability. In 2014 at Weaving Hand, Cynthia developed “Weaving Together”: a series of ongoing collaborative weaving events that focus on healing the community and create interpersonal relationships through the act of weaving together. Members of different communities are invited to bring recycled materials to weave alongside their neighbors. “Weaving Together” events were held at Museum of Arts and Design, Cooper Hewitt, Barnard College, Pratt Institute, Earth Day Initiative, Pioneer Works, Queens Museum, Ace Hotel, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and Bldg 92 Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Cynthia is also a recipient of the Dan River Weaving Award (1998); Peters Valley Craft Center Art Educator Scholarship (2008); The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2009); Museum of Arts and Design – Open Studio Artist Residency (2008 & 2018); and Ace Hotel Artist in Residence (2015 – 2016), Hunterdon Museum (2020), Hancock Shaker Village (2021), Artshack Brooklyn, Artist in Residence (2021) Since 2009, Cynthia has been a Resident Artist at League Artists Natural Design; a studio and gallery in Brooklyn, NY that features work by adult artists living with disabilities.
Cynthia was featured in the Cooper Hewitt Design Dictionary (2014), where she demonstrates the process of weaving. She has conducted lectures and workshops at the Queens Museum of Art (NY), Tyler School of Art, Pratt Institute, Fashion Institute of Technology, Brooklyn Fashion and Design Accelerator (BFDA), Sheridan College Textiles Department, and Kapisanan Philippine Centre for Arts and Culture.
Cynthia is a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology with a BFA in Textile Surface Design and exhibits her work worldwide.
http://www.cynthiaalberto.com/about-bio
Stage Manager: Rachel Mogan
| Hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area, Rachel Mogan is a Stage Manager as well as a Resident Artist with Crowded Fire. Recent Crowded Fire credits include Church directed by Mina Morita, Transfers with Ken Savage as well as Inked Baby directed by Lisa Marie Rollins. Other Bay Area credits include Stage Managing and Assistant Stage Managing with Cutting Ball Theater (Ondine, A Dreamplay, Hedda Gabler), Campo Santo Theater (Ethos De Masquerade, Candlestick), and Custom Made Theatre Co. (Hooded, Or Being Black For Dummies). |  |
Live Technical Direction, Online Production Design, Staging: Laia Cabrera & Co.
LAIA CABRERA & CO., co-founded by Laia Cabrera and Isabelle Duverger, is an award-winning team of film, animation, and visual artists based in New York. We produce a wide range of multimedia projects, from traditional and experimental filmmaking to the use of film and video streams in live performance, multimedia theater, video-mapped projection design, and site-specific interactive installations.
Isabelle Duverger (Visuals & Projection Design) is an award winning New York based French visual artist, animator and projection mapper, working in the US and Europe. Her work has been featured in documentaries, theater plays, feature films and public art. She has been working alongside Laia Cabrera for the past decade on the creation of site-specific immersive video and sound installations, multimedia shows and interactive pieces. She is a three-time New York Innovative Theater Awards nominee for Outstanding Innovative Design and NYIT award winner with New Stage Theatre Company for Outstanding Performance Art Production for “Night”. Her work has been presented in renowned venues such as Spring/Break Art Show (Armory Arts Week), Central Park Summer Stages, Times Square Plaza and St John the Divine Cathedral, La Mama, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York, NJPAC, Flutter Experience Art Gallery, Los Angeles, Nuit Blanche and Georgetown Glow, Washington DC, Teatros del Canal, Madrid and Fabra i Coats Contemporary Art Center, Barcelona, Spain and Tempietto Di Bramante, Roma, Italy among others.
Laia Cabrera (Visuals & Projection Design) is a filmmaker and video artist based in New York and critically recognized multimedia creator, working in the fields of art Installations, new cinema, immersive projection design, visual poetry, documentary and performing arts, with many projects straddling or blending elements of both fields. Ms. Cabrera’s innovative interdisciplinary work merges cinematic arts, dance, music, theater, digital arts and interactivity. Recipient of many awards including the 2016 Silver Telly Award for best Direction, AVA and Telly awards for best Animation, Documentary and Art Direction; NYIT awards 2015 winner for Best Art Production and 3-time nominee for Outstanding Innovative Video Design and winner of the Kodak & Color Lab award for Best Cinematic film for Under Influence. She is also the recipient of the several grants, KrTU Creators, Cultura i de les Arts (CONCA), NYC Council on the Arts, and DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities among others.
Her work includes traditional and experimental filmmaking, virtual theater and immersive video mapped site-specific installations presented worldwide and commissioned by major institutions. Her last works were presented in Times Square, Armory Arts Week-SPRING/BREAK Art Show New York, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), St John the Divine Cathedral, Nuit Blanche DC, La Mama, Dixon Place, Time Center at the New York Times, Art all Night DC, Georgetown Glow, PBS’s American Masters and Tempietto di Bramante, Rome, Italy and Fabra i Coats Contemporary Art Center, Barcelona, Spain. The video interactive art installation “The Now” inaugurated the largest digital public art platform COOLTURE IMPACT (Times Square) in New York, and her latest video immersive installation “Illusion” is currently exhibited in Los Angeles at Flutter Experiential Art Gallery in LA. She is currently the artistic director of LAIA CABRERA & CO co-founded with French animator Isabelle Duverger, a team of visual artists producing a wide range of multimedia projects.
Meet the Cast
About Atlantic Pacific Theatre
ATLANTIC PACIFIC THEATRE is a theater company that creates theatre works, public history programs, and community-engaged social practice art experiences for and with communities of color. Through our partnership-driven projects, we aim to enhance empathy, awareness, and understanding around POC histories and identities in local and transnational contexts. The company’s underpinning values of cross cultural exchange and pluralism center our work on polycultural experiences that reach across geographical and socially constructed borders.
Watch Black Henry
Watch the Talkback
Watch the pre-recorded live talkback with Black Henry’s playwright Luis H. Francia and stage director Claro de los Reyes and invited discussant Nerissa Balce (Stony Brook University-Department of Asian and Asian American Studies).