NY: HOLA and Oneaheart Productions present El canto de Carlota, April 19 2015.

THE HISPANIC ORGANIZATION OF LATIN ACTORS (HOLA), 

IN COLLABORATION WITH 
ONEHEART PRODUCTIONS, 

PRESENTS THE SPANISH-LANGUAGE PREMIERE OF 

EL CANTO DE CARLOTA

(CHARLOTTE'S SONG)

A DANCE THEATER WORK BY
NANCY FERRAGALLO. 

DIRECTED BY ANDREAS ROBERTZ 
AND MARIO GOLDEN. 

CHOREOGRAPHED BY NANCY FERRAGALLO AND CELESTE HASTINGS. 

ORIGINAL TEXT TRANSLATION BY 
MARIO GOLDEN.

A mother’s love transcends all dimensions.

SINGLE-EVENING PERFORMANCE TO BENEFIT HOLA 

WHERE: Flamboyán Theater, situated in
the Clemente Soto-Vélez Cultural Center
107 Suffolk St., Lower East Side 

WHEN: SUNDAY, APRIL 19, 2015 @ 5 P.M. 

TICKETS: $40, HOLA members: $35 (2 ticket limit/member)
Cash Box Office at door / Credit Cards accepted for advance sales only 
Call (212) 253-1015 to buy tickets. 

Running time: 90 min.

“Charlotte’s Song” by Nancy Ferragallo is a performance-based experimental work that explores a daughter’s reality of growing up with her emotionally disabled mother and how that impacted her life and healing process. It is a poetic collective of monologues, dialogue scenes and movement theater in the style of the Tanz Theater of Pina Bausch. The work is co-directed by Andreas Robertz and Mario Golden and co-choreographed by Nancy Ferragallo and Celeste Hastings.

The narrative is told through literary fragments and movement sequences. A mother (played by Mario Golden) and her daughter (played by Yvette Quintero) are so alienated from one another that they communicate primarily by letters. A dancer (Celeste Hastings) dances the mother’s inner life. As the play progresses, the daughter explores issues of betrayal and abandonment and comes to an ultimate understanding of her mother’s behavior. All is played out in the presence of a doll, designed by Maria Hupfield, who bears witness to the daily life of both women.

In shifting auditory landscapes, we hear the language of disconnect that announces the underlying fragility of the mother and her love and need for her daughter, all rendered in exquisite movement sequences and a clothing ritual. The play was born out of Nancy Ferragallo’s experiences with her own mother, who died when Nancy was 37. Ferragallo reports that the idea for this play “tugged at her and waited decades to be born.”

The production contains both spoken text and Tanz Theater reminiscent of the style of Pina Bausch. Ferragallo’s background is primarily in the field of dance. She believes that by transferring rituals drawn from the mother’s instability to the dancer rather than through the text, she conveys a fuller expression of the mother’s life. In the production, Celeste Hastings dances the mother’s inner life, in movement sequences which include undressing and redressing herself in various sets of clothing set to the repetitive and dissident scores of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and most notably, Luciano Berio (“Sequenza 111 per voce solo”).

“Charlotte’s Song” was first presented on December 7, 2012, at the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center’s Lab 101, as part of their residency program. The audience’s overwhelmingly positive response encouraged the author and directors Andreas Robertz and Mario Golden to move forward with the play, which was accepted for production at the Theater for the New City, where it enjoyed a three week run in the Spring of 2014.

Nancy Ferragallo is a dancer/choreographer, conceptual artist and writer. She began her professional career in dance with the San Francisco Contemporary Dancers. Over the course of her extensive career she studied, performed, choreographed and taught in the U.S., Germany and Israel. She spent several years in India and Nepal in collaboration with indigenous theater artists and dance companies. In addition, her work as a movement therapist at a hospital in Illinois provided her with a rich resource for her conceptual work that followed. Most recently, she collaborated with OneHeart Productions, the first as Luna, in the non-speaking role in “Lunas Armband” in Berlin (2010), while presenting her own conceptual dance theater work, “A Symbolic Improvisation” with members of the New York and Berlin casts. She conceived and wrote “Charlotte’s Song” for the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center’s Little Theater (2012) and was resident choreographer for the New York based production of “Breaking the Silence” at the Edinburgh Festival (2013). Nancy is thrilled about this workshop Spanish-language production of “Charlotte’s Song.” She writes: “It goes without saying that this is extremely meaningful to me, and I am very happy that my story can be shared with the Spanish-speaking community in New York.”

Andreas Robertz (Director) is Artistic Director of OneHeart Productions and a freelance director and producer working in both Germany and NYC. He last directed “Negative is Positive” at Theater for the New City in November 2014. Other plays he has directed in New York include “Deceit,” “The Love of Brothers,” “The Boxer’s Son,” and a workshop production of “Birmingham Reunion.” He has collaborated with the Immigrants’ Theatre Project, The Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, Around the Block and the Martin E. Segal Theatre. Andreas has received numerous directing awards and nominations in Germany, including the 2006 Cologne City Award for “The Pillowman.” He co-directs the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre’s Playwrights’ Unit and is a member of Lincoln Center Directors Lab network.

Mario Golden (Co-Director/Mother) is a writer, actor, director, teacher and co-director of Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre’s Professional Playwrights’ Unit. His plays include “The Boxer’s Son,” “The Love of Brothers,” “Confessions of a Sex Addict” and “Luna’s Bracelet.” The first two premiered at Theater for the New City and the last two premiered in Germany. Most recently he co-directed (with Andreas Robertz) “Birmingham Reunion” at La Guardia Performing Arts Center. He is founding co-director of One Heart Productions. This year Mario received a Best Actor nomination for his role as Hannah in “Charlotte’s Song” by the ATI Awards. He holds a BA and MA from Stanford.

Yvette Quintero (Daughter) studied at Stella Adler Conservatory, The Actor’s Center and with Catherine Gaffigan and Bernice Loren. She has just been nominated for Best Actress for “Charlotte’s Song” by the ATI Awards. She was also nominated for her first ACE Award this year for her role as Helen of Troy in “The Trojan Women”. Last year she received a nomination by ATI for her work in Dario Fo’s outrageous farce “The Virtuous Burglar.” In the fall of 2014 she completed a second run in Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” in which she was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Her other theater credits include “Cybersex,” “Los Amantes Del Alto Manhattan,” “Angel of the Poor,” “The Boxer’s Son,” “La Callas and Medea,” “My Night With Frida,” “The Ides of March,” “Twice Gloria,” “La Esposa y El Maniqui,” “Cheer Up Jackie,” “Her Train of Thought,” “Chastity of Hearts,” “Divino Castigo,” “The Involvement of Neighbors” and “Rosa’s Century.” Her film credits include “Heysoos,” “Hopeless Romantic,” “Welcome Home,” “Alejo Bachata,””Conciliation,” “Eva and Bruce,” “El Puente del Destino,” “Una Calle Sin Salida,” “Adrift In Manhattan” and “Bomber Jackets,” which was nominated for Best Film at the Golden Door International Film Festival. She just finished filming the short “Quedate(Stay)”, a powerful film dealing with suicide.

Celeste Hastings (The Other, Co-Choreographer) is a NYC based independent choreographer, performer, costume and video designer. Her work, both solo and group, fuses dance, theater, Japanese Butoh and visual arts with concepts of universal archetype. She has presented in the venues including the NY Butoh Festival, White Wave, CRS, Dixon Place, PS122, Galapagos, Frying Pan in France, Germany and Venezuela. She is director/choreographer of the satirical group The Butoh Rockettes. A lead dancer for 12 years with the post-modern butoh group Poppo and the Gogo Boys, she has more recently performed with Akira Kasai. Yukio Waguri, Richard Move, Noemie la France among many others. She has collaborated with Nancy Ferragallo in “Charlotte’s Song” in its original development at LPAC in 2012 and in 2014 at Theater for the New City. Also in 2014 Celeste presented her works “Victoria’s Shadow” in Performance Mix Festival, “The Blue Door,” a dance/film installation as guest artist in De Nova Dance’s ‘Sleep Lab’ at MAAS gallery, and collaborated with graphic designer Sondra Graff on “Traversing with Onions”, a video/photo dance project in upstate New York.