ClimActs WET! 2015 – Theater Offensive

Abe Rybeck,  Founding Director of The Theater Offensive  has been pushing the boundaries of LGBTQ activism for over 30 years and I am so fortunate to have been able to interact with him over the years.  We met at the National Performance Network – Annual meeting on Miami Beach at the Deauville Hotel.  It was during an after party, when suddenly, hardcore Cuban salsa music started to blast into the Grand Ballroom and before I knew it we where on the dance floor “salsaing” our brains out.

Deauville Hotel, Grand Ballroom, Miami Beach, FL

Since then I have considered him a mentor, confident and source of inspiration.  Here are scenes from CLIMACTS – WET!  2015.  An immersive performance installation I collaborated on with The Theater Offensive staff under the Artistic/Executive leadership of Nick Bazzo,  Adrian Budhu and Evelyn Francis with the super generous support of the NPN.

Here is a little excerpt of the video I created during my residency in Boston that played on the most gorgeous LED Flat screen.

Abe Rybeck, Alexandra Billings and Octavio Campos at ClimActs WET! 2015

Adrian Budhu, Nick Bazzo and his husband Stephen.

Abe Rybeck, Adrian Budhu and Evelyn Francis – Senior Staff at the Theater Offensive

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RAW COFFEE @ Filmgate Interactive

It has been almost one week since my first showing of Raw Coffee @FilmGate Interactive and the feedback has been more than positive.  I believe now more than ever that the relevance of Freedom and how we obtain it is key to a healthy and balanced existence.   Everyone craves for understanding,  to “get it”,  to know what’s going on or at least find out where to it is.   Change is inevitable.  The cells of our body change minute by minute.  The skins gets rougher. The bones get weaker.  The eyes get heavier.  The mind goes deeper.   Freedom is a privilege.  The work I am doing now is fusing together a lifetime of experience and misunderstandings.  Failing to authentically connect to the out of control train I am currently on.   Alone!  with my nostalgia of my heritage,  my languages and my stories.

Thank you Neil de la Flor for this really mindful review of the work,   it says it way better than I can.   I just always seems to get lost inside of the performance arena.   A haze of delights envelops my consciousness and I begin to breathe out of every pour in my body.   The charge that fuels me, ricochets like a dart right into my  heart.   The exchange I feel with the space, the audience and the circumstance creates a purpose for my precarious situation.   I thank all of you who have supported me throughout this process and I apologize to those that I am hurting right now.

Here are pictures by Carlos Andrew Cuervo

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NALAC – Regional Arts Workshop – Miami

The Koubek Center of Miami Dade College’s InterAmerican Campus set the scene for the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture‘s Regional meeting for the past two days Directed by the gracious, mindful and sage-like Latina Maria Lopez de Leon whom I’ve know now for about 8 years since my time programming and directing the art space in Little Havana at the Edificio Jose Marti,  801 Projects and Camposition Studios.  Themes of Imperialist Nostalgia in the Avant Garde, de-coding power,  how Latinos are becoming the wavemakers in social justice, readings from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to astonishing data from the National Endowment for the Arts and how Culture is impacting the gross national product more than tourism;

graphic from NEA

were just a touch of exhilarating revelations and musings brought to the table these last couple of days.   Great to hear from Rhythm Foundation and Laura Quinlan,  reconnecting with Charo Oquet of Edge Zones and seeing an excerpt of Teo Castellanos latest work “Third Trinity”.   Miami is alive and kicking, culturally.  Take a look at “Riding Wynwood”.    Let’s NEVER allow folks to say Miami is void of Culture. NEVER. 

LGBTQ Community: Roundtable Discussion

Please join Octavio Campos and Pioneer Winter in welcoming Boston-based activist and director Nick Bazo to the Miami community!

This FREE open forum has been designed to stimulate artists, teachers, managers and service providers that focus (or wish to learn more) on GLBTQ programming. The goal of this conversation is to reinvigorate and stir up a healthy conversation regarding the services South Florida is providing for it’s LGBTQ youth and adults. Please be part of this conversation with Nick Bazo, facilitated by Octavio Campos where they will introduce the work of The Theater Offensive founded by Abe Rybeck a trailblazer of GLBTQ arts and activism programming for the past 30 years. Your attendance is key to leveraging a productive conversation about how to grow our services, and education for the LGBTQ community in South Florida, as well as a time to share new energy and program management practices with other like-minded GLBTQ focused groups.

Refreshments and light fare will be provided, courtesy of RIFT Blackbox Theater.

About Nick Bazo:
Nick is a native Floridian, who currently resides in Boston, MA. Even at a young age, theater played a major part in his life. First earning a diploma from The Harrison School for the Arts in Lakeland, Florida and, later, a Bachelor’s degree in theatre from Rollins College and an MFA in Theatre for Young Audiences at the University of Central Florida. He is currently working as the Assistant Director of Programs and Director of True Colors: Out Youth Theater for The Theater Offensive in Boston. Here a link to a documentary being produced this year about the project. The Year We Thought About Love 

Performance Lab

 

This workshop has been designed to release and free individuals working in creative arenas that are being require to produce tremendous intellectual outcomes and sustained innovative high performance     Performance Lab  provides a space where participants quickly find clear pathways to erase mental blocks they may be experiencing due to creative burnout, stress, bad movement habits and emotional trauma caused through overwork, multitasking and deadline driven creativity    

Through a series of motion driven activities  Performance Lab will challenge creatives emotions to exit the work space and enter the play space.  Performers will conjure up states to perform within using their bodies and imaginations to create fresh, new and lucid circumstances to reenter their work with a new-found sense of curiosity and courage.   Participants will feel the effects of Performance Lab almost instantly.  Through a simple series of exercises creatives are released of physical and emotional tension allowing a renewed and rejuvenated mind and body  back into their performance driven creative practices with a new sense of freedom and ease.

The sessions are designed for anyone of any age or capacity with a willingness to fail.   Each session  and can be tailored to fit the needs of the ensemble or individual that usually last between 50 minutes – 90 minutes.  The methods used in Performance Lab where first developed  with performing and visual artists but now has expanded to serve hybrid creatives within the Science and Technology fields.

Octavio Campos, a movement practitioner, motivational director and luminary of the international expressive arts community brings 30 years of experience to Performance Lab.  He is an expert at  guiding participants through mind maps that trigger the nervous system prompting clear, easy, efficient and  soothing motion in the body.   His indirect use  of directed focus, subliminal imagery and deliciously relaxing athleticism revitalizing the most tired and unmotivated creatives.   The soundscapes he creates to support the workspace he encourage all to take risks, play games,  fail big, laugh hard, reboot nervous systems and rebuild confidence to tackle  any obstacle in front of them.

For information on how to book Octavio Campos for a workshop fill in the form below

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Simply Happy

Check out this commercial I choreographed with some of Miami’s finest!

Project – Cuba

TRPL Quince and The Pig Show,  my last two solo projects were both works that made me look deeply at my Cuban American  roots.   I finally made it to Cuba this past August and September.  Thanks to collaborator and dear friend,  Natasha Tsakos, (Artistic Director and Visual Artist), the pioneering powerhouse Debbie Ohanian (Producer),  a life long dream of mine has come true.  To create a devised-music-theater project in Havana, Cuba,  alongside incredible collaborators, the founder of Dansa Contemporanea and former director of the Tropicana NightClub, Santiago Alfonso and the Cuban music master, Issac Delgado.   Enjoy this Research and Inspiration video for the new project  “Salsa Mambo Cha Cha Cha”, bound for Broadway.  Stay tuned or for an invitation to the work in progress contact me.

 

Crusing Hialeah – in memory of queer academic José Muñoz

 presents
Cruising Hialeah or Ghost of Public Sex

A performance and video installation in memory of queer academic José Esteban Muñoz by DIGITAL HOSTAGE COLLECTIVE.
—————–
The Miami Beach Botanical Garden will be transformed into a space of queer utopian longing. “Cruisers” like dance theater provocateur Octavio Campos and choreographer Pioneer Winter will interact with visitors, soliciting them to listen to oral histories of the queer Miami and Hialeah of the 1980s—the time of José Esteban Muñoz coming-of-age as a gay man—while soprano Celeste Fraser Delgado and tenor José Vilanova circulate the grounds, evoking the devastating impact of the AIDS pandemic with haunting arias.

The intrepid may choose to enter the Garden’s Butterfly Room, transformed by visual artist and videographer Damian Rojo into a symbolic “back room,” where an installation culled from archival film and new video evokes what Muñoz calls the “utopian longing” of the public sex scene in the 1980s. “Cruising Hialeah” and “Ghosts of Public Sex” inaugurate “Cruising Miami,” a long-term project to develop an archive of Miami’s queer lifeworld and of performance by queers of color in South Florida.

The Cruising Miami project aims to bring José home to South Florida’s queer community through a salon dedicated to his work and a performance coupled with a video installation recreating the cruising scene he missed out on in his youth, and a mural visible to young queers proclaiming the most famous quote from Cruising Utopia:

“Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of the moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” – José E. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
—————–
Born in Havana and raised in Hialeah, JOSÉ ESTEBAN MUÑOZ grounded his theoretical work in a performance and public sex archive derived mainly from New York City and Los Angeles. Also born in Cuba and raised in Hialeah at roughly the same time, DAMIAN ROJO immersed himself from an early age in the suburb’s queer culture, unknown to Muñoz, documenting much of his experience first on Super 8 film, and later on video. Though they never met, Muñoz as scholar and Rojo as artist separately explored parallel queer worlds of punk music and public sex throughout their careers.

While growing up in Hialeah, Muñoz was largely unaware of the queer culture flourishing at that time in South Florida. Although he regularly returned home to visit his Evangelical Christian parents, he never wrote about or appears to have even seen any queer performers in Miami. Likewise, the queer community in South Florida is largely unaware of his work.

ABOUT DIGITAL HOSTAGE COLLECTIVE: The Collective negotiates life, death, and sexuality in the digital age through interdisciplinary works that fuse the carnal with the virtual. Long-time collaborators singer/writer Celeste Fraser Delgado and visual artist/videographer Damian Rojo work with a shifting roster of consorts, which for Cruising Miami includes dance theater provocateur Octavio Campos, poet Neil de la Flor, dramatic tenor José Vilanova, and [choreographer Pioneer Winter.

*This performance is not suitable for minors under 18*

ABOUT READING QUEER

boylesque debut NYC – Octavio Campos

 

Octavio Campos in his first boylesque performance at Radical Vaudeville curated by Gabrielle St. Evenson at the Kraine Theater,  East Village,  NYC.

Radical Vaudeville – boylesque performance by Octavio Campos

 

Baryshnikov Arts Center Residency

In January of 2013 I was approached by Mikhail Baryshnikov at a rehearsal for Rosie Herrera’s new work Dinning Alone.   To my surprise I received a call from his Executive Director and colleague, Georgiana Picket.  She asked me to submit work to “Misha” and a few months later, I received an invitation for “no pressure” creative residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, Me and Georgiana Picket after the opening night of Dining Alone by Rosie Herrera at he Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC.

Here is a video that was made during the final days of the residency.

Dear friend and journalist Danny Brody produced this fun video after the first public showing of the newly born project created during my residency which will from now on be called TRPL  Quince.   Here is that clip from the NEW YORK MINUTE.

Studio A – the scene of creation at Baryshnikov Arts Center. Just like heaven with a dance floor.

Link to residency page:  Octavio Campos – Baryshnikov Art Center residency

Crusing Hialeah – in memory of queer academic José Muñoz

 presents
Cruising Hialeah or Ghost of Public Sex

A performance and video installation in memory of queer academic José Esteban Muñoz by DIGITAL HOSTAGE COLLECTIVE.
—————–
The Miami Beach Botanical Garden will be transformed into a space of queer utopian longing. “Cruisers” like dance theater provocateur Octavio Campos and choreographer Pioneer Winter will interact with visitors, soliciting them to listen to oral histories of the queer Miami and Hialeah of the 1980s—the time of José Esteban Muñoz coming-of-age as a gay man—while soprano Celeste Fraser Delgado and tenor José Vilanova circulate the grounds, evoking the devastating impact of the AIDS pandemic with haunting arias.

The intrepid may choose to enter the Garden’s Butterfly Room, transformed by visual artist and videographer Damian Rojo into a symbolic “back room,” where an installation culled from archival film and new video evokes what Muñoz calls the “utopian longing” of the public sex scene in the 1980s. “Cruising Hialeah” and “Ghosts of Public Sex” inaugurate “Cruising Miami,” a long-term project to develop an archive of Miami’s queer lifeworld and of performance by queers of color in South Florida.

The Cruising Miami project aims to bring José home to South Florida’s queer community through a salon dedicated to his work and a performance coupled with a video installation recreating the cruising scene he missed out on in his youth, and a mural visible to young queers proclaiming the most famous quote from Cruising Utopia:

“Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of the moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” – José E. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
—————–
Born in Havana and raised in Hialeah, JOSÉ ESTEBAN MUÑOZ grounded his theoretical work in a performance and public sex archive derived mainly from New York City and Los Angeles. Also born in Cuba and raised in Hialeah at roughly the same time, DAMIAN ROJO immersed himself from an early age in the suburb’s queer culture, unknown to Muñoz, documenting much of his experience first on Super 8 film, and later on video. Though they never met, Muñoz as scholar and Rojo as artist separately explored parallel queer worlds of punk music and public sex throughout their careers.

While growing up in Hialeah, Muñoz was largely unaware of the queer culture flourishing at that time in South Florida. Although he regularly returned home to visit his Evangelical Christian parents, he never wrote about or appears to have even seen any queer performers in Miami. Likewise, the queer community in South Florida is largely unaware of his work.

ABOUT DIGITAL HOSTAGE COLLECTIVE: The Collective negotiates life, death, and sexuality in the digital age through interdisciplinary works that fuse the carnal with the virtual. Long-time collaborators singer/writer Celeste Fraser Delgado and visual artist/videographer Damian Rojo work with a shifting roster of consorts, which for Cruising Miami includes dance theater provocateur Octavio Campos, poet Neil de la Flor, dramatic tenor José Vilanova, and [choreographer Pioneer Winter.

*This performance is not suitable for minors under 18*

ABOUT READING QUEER

Pig Burlesque

The Pig Show is a 45 minute subversive cabaret solo show. Associative story telling meets interactive queer stand up performed by Miami’s own performance provocateur, Cuban- American Octavio Campos. The piece looks at the passing of pop culture icons, Weimar republic sex workers and dead dancers like Michael Jackson & Pina Bausch inside of a naive retelling of the story of the invasion at the Bay of Pigs in Havanna, Cuba.

Conceived and performed by
Octavio Campos

Music
Juan Carlos Espinosa, George Gerschwin, Spolinski

Costumes
Slick it Up

Lighting
Kevin Roman

Production
Camposition Inc.

This video sample of THE PIG SHOW is from the section called: PIG BURLESQUE

the full performance of a work in progress showing was done at WinterFest – Miami Dances 2011 in Miami Beach, FL January of 2011, World Premiere at Revolt, Melbourne, Australia part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival and lastly at Hot Festival – Dixon Place – NYC 2013.

 

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/22954509″>The Pig Show – PIG BURLESQUE</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/octaviocampos”>Octavio Campos</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>