Butchlalis de Panochtitlan

Butchlalis de Panochtitlan are a queer Chicana-Latina theater and multimedia performance group active as an ensemble from 2002 to 2010. Formed in Los Angeles, they have performed in a range of venues and events throughout California and nationally. They premiered their major stage works at the important queer cultural arts center Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California. Their irreverent name, a play on Tenochtitlan, the pre-Columbian name for modern day Mexico City, and panocha, creative Spanglish slang for female genitalia, translates to “the butch stars of pussy land.” True to their name, BdP render brown butch-centered worlds in their works that map the City of Los Angeles through the queer life in its neighborhoods, barrios, nightclubs, and re-imagined spaces of radical possibility. Although they are no longer active as a group and few primary documents exist, their impact is traceable well beyond these limits and local contexts. This article presents an overview of the work and impact of Butchlalis de Panochtitlan with attention to key themes in their body of work including home, belonging, queer family, gentrification, butch-femme relations, and brown butch socialities and aesthetics. This article draws from primary and secondary sources, digital recordings, visual images, online sources, ephemera, reviews, and published interviews.

A technical approach of the audience participation in the performance 'O Chaos das 5'

Since HTML 5 and web audio were released, we have seen several initiatives to construct web based instruments and musical applications based on this technology. Web based instruments involved composers, musicians and the audience in musical performances based in the fact that a web instrument embedded in a web page can be accessed by everyone. Nonetheless, despite the fact that these applications are accessible by the network, it is not easy to use the network and these technologies to synchronize the participants of a musical performance and control the level of interaction in a collaborative musical creation scenario. Based on a multimedia performance created in our research group, O Chaos das 5, we present in this paper some scenarios of interaction and control between musicians and the audience that can be reached using a server side programming infrastructure along with the HTML5. In this performance, the audience took part of the musical soundscape using a cellphone to access a set of digital instruments. These scenarios and the proposed solutions brought up a set of possibilities to balance control and interaction of audience participation into live performance using web instruments.