AMERICAN THEATRE | Teo Castellanos, Miami Theatre Transformer

The second that appeared like it could launch Miami theatre artist Teo Castellanos into the world turned out to be the one which stored him at dwelling. He was performing his first full-length piece, N.E. 2nd Avenue, a multi-character solo present of only-in-Miami personalities, from a Haitian jitney driver to a Cuban rafter, on the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The present had been successful again dwelling. But in Scotland, an more and more despairing Castellanos confronted an empty theatre every night time. When he bumped into a bunch of visiting Miami college students from an arts program at a predominantly Black highschool, he pleaded with them to return. They crammed the home that night time, screaming with delight and recognition at seeing individuals they knew onstage.

In their midst was Edinburgh’s main theatre critic, Mark Brown of The Scotsman, whose rave overview known as N.E. 2nd “so brilliantly conceived and so fabulously acted that it goes instantly to the compartment of the brain marked ‘reasons I go to the theatre.’” His reward led to a sellout run and a prestigious Fringe First Award.

It additionally satisfied Castellanos to double down on telling Miami tales and serving to extra younger individuals like those who’d borne him up that night time to seek out their inventive method. 

“I love my people,” Castellanos recalled of that second. “I made the decision not to go to L.A. or New York but to stay and cultivate the scene here.”

Teo Castellanos could also be Miami’s most transformative theatre artist. He has empowered generations of Black, Latino, and socially or financially disempowered adolescents, like he as soon as was, to inform their tales by way of theatre, poetry, and efficiency. He has devoted painstaking years to show everybody from hiphop b-boys to fight veterans easy methods to be theatre artists. His solo and group devised items, from N.E. 2nd to final October’s F/Punk Junkies, which channeled Afro-Caribbean fantasy and raging punk spirit, have given voice to the distinctive tradition of this immigrant-shaped metropolis.

Castellanos is neither well-to-do nor well-known exterior a comparatively small circle of principally Miami-based theatre and up to date efficiency artists and the establishments that assist them. (He was a 2021 Doris Duke Artist in theatre and a 2019 United States Artist Fellow.) But he has lived, resides, precisely the life he needs.

“My dreams have become reality,” Castellanos, 60, as soon as advised me. “I never equated success with becoming rich and famous. I did equate it with forging my own path, creating my own life and lifestyle, doing what I love, and loving what I do.”

His most well-known scholar, Tarell Alvin McCraney, chair of the Yale School of Drama’s playwriting program, generally wonders which ones obtained it proper.

“As kids we wanted to get out of Miami,” McCraney mentioned from his Yale workplace. “Teo said, ‘You’re letting people fool you out of paradise.’ ”

Miami wasn’t paradise for Castellanos at first. His household moved right here from Puerto Rico when he was 6, and he grew up in Carol City (now Miami Gardens), then a notoriously violent space divided between Blacks and Latinos. (“Sister city to the South Bronx!” he calls it within the autobiographical Third Trinity.) His single mom labored two jobs. Castellanos dropped out of faculty, obtained into consuming and medicines, and labored for years as a bus driver and supervisor. He exulted at balancing his straight job with getting excessive and sustaining a hipster night time life: dancing at golf equipment, singing in punk and ska bands, going to gallery openings, attracting ladies.

By his mid-20s, drug dependency threatened to destroy that stability. But Castellanos stepped again from life on the sting. He obtained clear and sober. And one thing opened inside him. “All these feelings came up,” he advised me for a 2005 story.. “One of the big ones was: I am an artist. I want to be an artist.” 

He obtained a theatre diploma from Florida Atlantic University in 1994, and purchased the two-bedroom home the place he nonetheless lives that very same yr, cultivating a lush jungle of a backyard. His girlfriend Lorna Burke, who helped him get clear, turned his spouse of 32 years; their daughter Jaquen (a reputation they invented, combining Jamaica, the place Lorna is from, and Borinquen, the Indigenous title for Puerto Rico), born in 1990, writes for TV in L.A. And he turned a faithful practitioner of Zen Buddhism, which got here to form his life as a lot as theatre and educating have.

His saga was enormously compelling. I’ve identified Castellanos since he was an everyday at a poetry night time in a South Beach membership within the late Eighties. Small, lean, his modern head shaved, he was so lit then, he appeared electrified. As an arts author on the Miami Herald, I wrote a profile detailing his journey “From the Street to the Sage,” because the headline put it.

But Teo is finished telling that story. “I don’t want to focus on that at this stage in my life,” he mentioned lately. “It’s irrelevant.” 

What stays related is how pushed he has been to create himself as an artist, and to offer others the instruments to seek out that means and create group that he needed to uncover for himself. 

Castellanos started inventing his personal mannequin of theatre as quickly as he began learning. He was confounded and incensed that his faculty lecturers pressed him to lose his accent, and that kinds which have been pure to him—hip-hop, improvising in a circle of friends, spoken phrase—have been excluded. “This idea that you have to erase your culture, your upbringing, your ancestry, is ludicrous,” he mentioned lately. “I was like, ‘This is not right! The ancestors in me are revolting.’ ”

He learn Peter Brook, Augusto Boal, Grotowski, and Puerto Rican poets; researched African griots and pre-Colombian shamans, Theatre of the Oppressed. In retrospect, he sees that what he was attempting to do was to decolonize theatre earlier than that turned a catchword. “When that word came out, I realized that’s what I’ve been doing,” he mentioned.

He instantly built-in these concepts into educating. McCraney was one among his earliest college students, in a program Castellanos led from 1995 to 1999, for teenagers to put in writing and carry out items about medicine and AIDS of their Black and Latino neighborhoods. A counselor who knew McCraney’s mom was in rehab despatched the keen 15-year-old to audition. 

“Teo didn’t think I was very talented, but he saw my passion,” McCraney mentioned with amusing. He stayed with this system by means of highschool at New World School of the Arts, Miami’s famend public-school conservatory, and even by means of his first yr at DePaul University. That expertise molded McCraney as an artist and impressed his dedication to foster dramatists from exterior the mainstream at Yale who can communicate for his or her communities.

“I call Teo my father in art,” mentioned McCraney, who turned a detailed pal and colleague to Castellanos. “I began taking my work as not only one portion of myself however my full existence. Teo knew that, like him, we would have liked the instruments of storytelling and hope to grasp the world of chaos we got here from. We couldn’t lie. Those instruments, that technique, is at all times in my thoughts. If I’m doing a play and it may possibly’t occur on these streets, it doesn’t move the Teo take a look at. It’s not genuine sufficient.

“I never felt like Teo was taking pity on us,” McCraney continued. “It was always, ‘I understand; here are some ways we can work through that.’ Teo made me the author of my own story. Teo says: Don’t just accept the dreams that are given to you.” 

Castellanos has continued to show related packages. In 2014 I visited him as he coached college students in WordSpeak, a citywide poetry program for highschool college students, for a nationwide spoken phrase competitors, which he did for 9 years. Castellanos adored his college students, lots of them coping with fraught households or neighborhoods.

“I’m just floored by their commitment and resilience,” he mentioned. “I don’t know why some people are blessed with that and some are not.”

He was additionally meticulous and demanding. “Better impress me—let’s see what y’all got!” he exhorted a trio of younger Black and Haitian males doing a poem on gun violence. He had them analysis and write poems on social themes: terrorism, disappearing languages. “They come to understand that the world is bigger than their community,” he advised me. “It deepens their compassion and understanding.”

Mary Luft, whose nonprofit Tigertail Productions ran WordSpeak, mentioned of Castellanos’s rapport with the scholars, “They believed in him. He had the ability to reach into their creative self and pull out the best of who they were.”

At the start of his profession, Castellanos acted in native performs, and in TV reveals and movies (normally as a Latino thug). He discovered his métier within the late ’90s, when he started making solos for Here & Now, an annual competition of brief authentic works produced by the nonprofit Miami Light Project. Artistic and govt director Beth Boone advised Castellanos develop one solo, commissioning what turned N.E. 2nd Avenue, MLP’s first main undertaking with an area artist. The firm turned Castellanos’s creative base, commissioning and presenting his devised items. He and Boone turned shut, and he helped encourage her to make fostering Miami artists and tales central to MLP’s mission.

“We both have a deeply held commitment to community,” mentioned Boone, who calls Castellanos, now president of MLP’s board, her creative associate. “His work is not about making something so he can go to New York or L.A. His life’s work is about being right here, right now. It’s about deepening our roots where we are.” 

The ’90s have been the heyday of multi-character solo reveals by the likes of John Leguizamo and Danny Hoch. Castellanos was a fan—to some extent. “They all represented New York really well,” he advised me in 2005. “I thought, I want to represent Miami.”

N.E. 2nd, which premiered in 2002, transfixed Miami. Castellanos had an eerily chameleonic capability to embody his characters: the stiffly right posture and indignant Creole of the Haitian jitney driver, the Cuban-Yiddish accent of a confounded Jewban (Jewish-Cuban) grandfather attempting to attach along with his mixed-race grandson; the survivor’s bravado and ricocheting Spanglish of the Cuban rafter promoting fruit at a visitors gentle. We knew these individuals. But this metropolis, although deeply formed by generations of immigrants and the place Latinos dominate the tradition and inhabitants, had at all times had seen itself validated by means of white and/or outsider eyes, whether or not it was within the movie Scarface or within the much-hyped arrival of Art Basel. Castellanos as a substitute gave us a pure, pungent refraction of Miami as solely any individual from right here may. The piece had a number of revivals and excursions. Despite his many different initiatives, there’s a method through which he’ll eternally be recognized with N.E. 2nd.

After Edinburgh he fashioned D-Projects, based mostly at MLP, and expanded his educating into Scratch & Burn, his first group piece. He gathered hiphop b-boys, virtuosos at breakdancing and freestyling, and spent a yr and a half educating them each conventional and non-Western types of efficiency, from Chekhov to African rituals; then acted as director and collaborator to deliver them collectively for an incandescent, movement-driven piece raging on the battle in Iraq and the human drive for domination and violence.

One of these b-boys was Rudi Goblen, then 23, who, like McCraney, was reworked by working with Castellanos. He turned a theatre artist and is now getting his MFA in Yale’s playwriting program (I profiled him for this journal in 2020). Castellanos stays Goblen’s shut pal and basis. “There hasn’t been one stage I’ve been on that Teo hasn’t been there with me,” Goblen advised me.

His affect hasn’t solely been on the younger. The transformation among the many Combat Hippies, a small group of middle-aged Puerto Rican battle veterans whom Castellanos started working with in 2015, below the aegis of Miami Dade College’s dwell arts program, might have been much more profound. He spent 4 years coaching and serving to them create AMAL (Arabic for hope), a wrenching piece in textual content, motion, and music on the racism and trauma that comes with being from an island colonized by the U.S., then combating its wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

The course of wasn’t straightforward. “Getting those guys to move and perform was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Castellanos sighed to me as soon as. Antony Torres, who now manages and raises cash for the Combat Hippies, recalled considering, “This dude wants me to dig deep into childhood and war, and now he wants me to memorize this shit and perform it onstage? I was so scared.”

Castellanos gave them braveness. And one thing extra, mentioned Torres: “What we connected over deeply was the universality of trauma we’d all been through, including Teo—understanding that’s not all we are. We have something to say about survival and resilience and growth.”

Castellanos, too, makes use of theatre to course of the ache in his personal life, and the empathetic stress he carries from serving to others take care of theirs. He got here to the Combat Hippies from 2014’s Third Trinity, a multi-character solo about him and his two cousins, raised as his brothers, one a Puerto Rican nationalist and the opposite a Miami drug smuggler, discovering redemption and mythic energy of their battle to manage their future and discover objective. Directed by McCraney, it was Castellanos’s most personally revealing present.

Afterwards he swore he’d by no means do it, or one other solo piece, once more. “It was too personal,” he mentioned. “It took a lot out of me emotionally.”

Buddhism has been key to balancing his feelings. He’s an ordained Zen priest who for years has began every day (besides Sunday, when he sleeps in) with a pre-dawn hour of meditation. He’s a follower of the famend Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, whose teachings on interconnectedness, and the obligation to ease others’ struggling, have sustained Castellanos’s devotion to serving to others and helped him take care of anger at injustice, in addition to ache at his personal or others’ trauma. He usually refers to “no mud, no lotus,” the title of Nhat Hanh’s best-known guide, which invokes the concept good grows from dangerous, that they’re inextricably linked.

His newest piece, F/Punk Junkies, started gestating pre-pandemic as a dive into the Black punk and New Wave music he’d cherished in his 20-something nightclubbing days (dancing remains to be a go-to launch). But over the three years it took to make, it additionally turned a celebration of the facility of its 5 Black and Latina ladies performers: three middle-aged, two non-dancers, none conventional actors. Staged at MLP’s Wynwood area in early October, it combined surrealism with Afro-Caribbean non secular myths and folklore, and the looming spirit of blues legend Robert Johnson. Castellanos, who initially meant solely to direct, had a comparatively small function, as a fey model of a Santeria deity who will get a beatdown when he tries to sneak right into a feminine secret society.

One of these ladies was Haitian American singer-songwriter Inez Barlatier, whose father led a Haitian music group Castellanos carried out with within the ’90s. She had by no means executed theatre earlier than, however “Teo said, ‘You can do this—I will teach you’,” she advised me after a present attended by her beaming father. 

Castellanos, who had knee surgical procedure and, after two years of pandemic self-discipline, caught COVID simply earlier than the present, had sworn that, at 60, F/Punk can be his final dwell efficiency. Now he’s not so positive. “I must admit I had a blast,” he mentioned.

With that undertaking executed, he was wanting ahead to a uncommon likelihood to journey along with his spouse for every week’s trip in London. He needs to collaborate with Barlatier once more, and with Shamar Watts, a charismatic Jamaican-born dancer-choreographer whom Castellanos calls “phenomenal.” He needs to additional discover the potential of surrealism, “where I can make up worlds.” And by means of Adrienne Arsht Center, he’s working with some former WordSpeak college students on a present they wrote which can tour public excessive colleges, which Goblen directed, persevering by means of “hell” to get the script authorised by directors nervous over Florida’s repressive new “don’t say gay” regulation limiting educating on race, gender, and sexuality.

We spoke quickly after F/Punk closed over espresso in Wynwood, the place the awestruck barista acknowledged Castellanos from an look at her highschool. He has lived by means of the neighborhood’s transformations, from late-night adventures when it was a crime-plagued space, to his years at Miami Light Project’s close by area as Wynwood turned a cultural and avenue artwork haven. Now it’s crammed with condos and vacationers, and improvement has pushed MLP to a brand new neighborhood.

Yet Castellanos stays equanimous.

“I still love my city, with all its gentrification and right-wing politics,” he mentioned, as we settled at an outdoor desk. “It’s hard. I guess it’s my Zen practice. If I take a stick and say I’m only fond of the left side and cut off the right end, I still have the stick. We only know happiness because we know suffering.”

Jordan Levin (she/her) is an arts author and editor in Miami.

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