Taller Aims to Be Voice of Color in a White Art World

While Hollywood has suddenly “discovered” Latino culture, a collective of five non-white artists called Taller has been working locally for the last year to change social attitudes in an art world that they find curiously backward and self-serving.

“The process of dealing with our lives, our fears, our dreams and our people’s exclusion from the so-called mainstream is a lot more important than being what others would like us to be,” says Fernando Castro, an outspoken member of the movement-based performance group.

“I feel responsible in distilling a sense of the tragedy of the lives around us in very blatant and strong terms, whether the art world likes it or not.”

Four Taller pieces can be seen at LACE from Friday to Sunday.

The Spanish word Taller (pronounced Ta’yer) signifies a work space without censorship. The collective adopted it to convey a need to find new ways to explore Third World culture in the United States.

Derived from workshop experiments led by local art visionary Scott Kelman, Taller’s works combine autobiographical and poetic narrative with confrontational gestures taken from various ethnic groups.

At one point in Castro’s “Homeboys Have No Homes,” the performers shake their fists, rattle spray-paint cans and chant:

Somebody be driving by killing your friend your cousin

Somebody be taking their rags and put them in a casket someday

and you be thinking all that

and you miss a friend

anger never goes away.

Castro says he can’t understand why the urban folklore expressed by those words have infiltrated TV and movies far more than they have affected artistic circles.

“Post-modernism has resorted to dealing with a small, conceptual, and minimal focus on reality,” he says. “But we, as people of color, are confronted with the big picture and we find that the avant-garde model of art-making . . . may no longer be useful.”

His colleague, Luis Alfaro, adds that even “the most so-called experimental spaces in L.A. have yet to really deal with the contributions ethnic artists are making in contemporary culture.”

In his monologue “True Stories From the Corner of Pico and Union,” Alfaro plays both “Sleepy,” a glue sniffer, and “Manola,” a transvestite who loses a barroom brawl--and in the process Alfaro says he encounters a mysteriously disturbing persona in himself. “I work at the Nelles Prison Theatre program,” Alfaro says, “and I sometimes I find myself connecting with the inmates there--especially when I delve into a part of me that that comes from having a complex, painful background as an inner-city kid.”

He laughs. “My friends from the old neighborhood--I grew up in Pico Union--come to my shows and ask why don’t Latinos ever make pieces about love?” he says.

“I can understand where they’re coming from. But sometimes I think that some (Anglo) artists are flipped out by this particular vision of the city, this very gritty take on life in ethnic L.A.” Mary Tamaki, the only Asian-American in the troupe, emphasizes the importance of “multidiscipline” expression to Taller.

Tamaki, who was trained in Kabuki dance, uses text and movement in “Odori” to depict her mother’s experience in U.S. internment camps for people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

“Dance, by itself, would not express my own pain and my own past in a way that would speak to different audiences,” she says.

Tamaki believes that what Taller brings to audiences is a principle missing since the late ‘60s: “responsibility of the social variety.”

“We have a need to offer an alternative to the comfortable and reassuring works you see at most places,” she says.

“Fernando (Castro) is a poet, I’m a dancer, Luis (Alfaro) is an actor Rudy (Caballero), another collaborator, has big, conceptual ideas.

“We have gone through an intense training period . . . which taught us how to ritualize and frame our anger in gestural, simplified ways. We sometimes try out a line like ‘M folks are a caravan of fruit pickers’ a hundred times to help each other balance out our formal concerns with the content we want to deal with.”

“We love working together,” she says, pointing to Michael Angelo Avila, the youngest member of the collective who was trying to become an actor before he joined Taller. Avila has been quiet for most of the conversation but now suddenly speaks out.

“They say I keep them honest,” Avila says, laughing. “They say I keep them down to Earth, not artsy.”

“All I know is that I like it best when the work feel real to me, like it reminds me of things that really happened at home, in the ‘hood.”