by Teo Castellanos D-Projects
November 15-17, 2013
To have and have not: Fat Boy is a compelling multi-disciplinary performance that explores global themes of scarcity, abundance, poverty, and consumerism.
The inspiration for this piece was Castellanos’ travel to India and his experience with poverty at a train station in Mumbai. Coming face-to-face with world poverty was an overwhelming, psychologically and metaphysically charged experience. “The idea was how fat our nation is,” Castellanos says. “We’re wasteful in so many ways. We’re constantly consuming, and mass consumption leads to weight gain, which leads to ill health. I think we are in a state of ill spiritual, emotional and mental health. We’re in constant fear of not having enough.”
Written and directed by Teo Castellanos, with choreography by him and TCDP members, Fat Boy mixes contemporary theater and spoken word with hip-hop and B-Boy choreography, and includes elements of Balinese rice rituals and mythology and traditional Buddhist ritual movement. Scoring this hybrid work is dub reggae music composed by Grammy–nominated Andrew (“DJ LeSpam”) Yeomanson, as well as dancehall beats.
In using an inventive mix of the ancient and modern, classic and contemporary, and ritual and performance, TCDP illustrates the stark contrast between abundance/waste and scarcity/economy, and encourages its audiences to reconsider its relationship to material goods.
Miami Light Project commissioned Fat Boy with co-commissioning support from the Hip-Hop Theater Festival. HHTF support was made possible through the Future Aesthetics Artist Regrant (FAAR) program, funded by the Ford Foundation.
Fat Boy is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by Tigertail Productions, in partnership with Miami Light Project, 7 Stages and the NPN. The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment support the Creation Fund for the Arts.
Fat Boy was made possible with funding by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Pilot, with lead funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
