Candice D’Meza and “Miss LaRaj’s House of Dystopian Futures”
There are no concise handles in our English language to describe creative people. Considering the range of creative expression and tools Houston artist Candice D’Meza explores and utilizes in her practice, including theater, filmmaking, critical pedagogy, rituals, and activism, those oft-overused words in arts writing, “multidisciplinary” and “interdisciplinary,” are accurate. From Fatherland, a solo, autobiographical meditation on grief and the perils of ancestral veneration; to A Maroon’s Guide to Time and Space, an Afrofuturist vision of Harriet Tubman as a multidimensional time traveler, D’Meza’s theatrical work is highly experimental, firmly grounded in the actor’s technique, and deeply connected to ancient African and Diasporic African spiritual technologies, including Vodou, and the cosmologies of the Dogon and the Dagara people of Burkina Faso. The descriptive “serious play” is also applicable to D’Meza’s approach to art making. Like any great playwright, from Shakespeare to George C. Wolfe, she understands laughter is serious business, as serious as your life.
On Friday, Feb 7, The Catastrophic Theatre presents the world premiere of Miss Laraj’s House of Dystopian Futures, conceived by D’Meza and co-directed by D’Meza and fellow hyphenated art maker T Lavois Thiebaud. The production is set in a post-apocalyptic world where civilization has been devasted by “a myriad of human-made cruelties.” Nature, in a variety of guises, including talking animals and trees, a storytelling rock, and other “anthropomorphic primordial entities,” come together to try and convince humans of their potential to create a better future. The tropes of children’s television are used for some grown-up talk about the future of the planet.
D’Meza, an African American-Haitian Queer mother of three, sees a direct parallel between contempt and abuse of the Earth’s environment and the current assault on Queer communities. “I feel a bit Octavia Butler-ish,” says D’Meza. “I didn’t know this moment was coming so quickly. We premiere just as Trump has made this official declaration that it’s the United States policy that there are only two genders and pulled out of the Paris agreement.”
Through its complex mix of traditional theater, dance, music and singing, lighting, and video, Miss Laraj’s House of Dystopian Futures posits that non-human relationships can inform and transform the ways we look at such issues as trans rights, gender inequality, and mutual aid. “Nature has a gender variety that is large and expansive, and varied eco-systems where multiple plants can thrive, come in and out of symbiosis, and still find their way to a new way of being,” says D’Meza. In this theatrical context, animals, plants, and elements such as earth and water are informed by African cosmologies, including the aforementioned grumpy, storytelling rock. “Art is considered a mineral practice,” says D’Meza, referring to the five elements of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso. “Because an artist is drawing up from their bones and DNA — an archived story that is coming from this larger archive of humanity.”
The name, Miss Laraj, is a mash-up of beloved PBS host Mister Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and the bawdy, Black, transgender Miss Roj from George C. Wolfe’s play The Colored Museum (a role D’Meza played in her youth). As in much of her work, technology and ancient rituals intersect in surprising, sometimes humorous ways. D’Meza is one of two digital characters who appear as screen projections; and then there’s the “mushroom cam,” which transmits what’s happening to humans on terra firma from the perspective of mycelium — the roots that connect and enable plants to exchange water, carbon, nitrogen, and other minerals. The mushroom-cam’s projections are fed into old television sets dispersed throughout the space. James Templeton created the video for the production while the immersive set, which includes a thrust and pieces suspended above the seats, was designed by Afsaneh Aayani.
For D’Meza, our collective resistance to the possibilities of and working toward a healthier, less violent, and more inclusive future has everything to do with a crisis of imagination. “The imagination has been colonized,” says D’Meza. “It has been ripped from us as something that is inefficient and childlike, and something we must part ways with in order to achieve adulthood and function in the world. But I find imagination is the only tool that helps us to wrap our head around what a new society could look like.”
With this in mind, D’Meza uses the expansive palette of multidisciplinary theater to conjure a futurist vision that the audience can feel viscerally and physically.
“Once the body experiences it, it’s hard not to remember,” says D’Meza. “I want to bring all of these communities that I love so much and am experiencing at multi-levels to a place where this is the world so that maybe we can start to imagine what the future could look like and build what can be.”
Miss Laraj’s House of Dystopian Futures runs February 7 – March 1, 2024, at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston (MATCH). Tickets can be purchased at matchouston.org, by calling the MATCH box office at 713-521-4533, or in person by visiting the MATCH box office at 3400 Main Street. Performances are Thursdays at 7:30 PM, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 PM, and Sundays at 2:30 PM, with a Special Monday Night performance to be announced. Tickets to all performances are Pay-What-You-Can.