The Buzz Intro Interview | Kate Morales

Respondent: Kate Morales
Position in Company: Producer
Show Title: Água Loves a Monster

“Much of this show draws from or takes place in the dreamworld, which is a nightly source of creative material with which I have been able to cultivate a strong relationship even in times of social isolation.”

Why should people see your show?

“The monsters have our power. I want it back.” – says Água, daring the audience to follow them into the dark.

I’m guessing you’ve never experienced a show like Água Loves a Monster. This show is designed around the questions: “how is a performance a ritual?” and, “what helps groups of people look at hard things and stay with the trouble?” and, “what conditions make it possible for performer and audience to experience healing together?”

My intention in putting this show onstage is to explore the potential for live theater to not only move energy through the group body, but to invite the audience to co-create a container that metabolizes the monsters and leaves us with more vitality than we came in with.

This show is especially dedicated to everybody who’s been out in the streets this year who is longing for social transformation that is nourishing, beautiful and effective.

What about festivals intrigues you? And why the Atlanta Fringe?

We theatermakers and festival-goers play a vital role in the dance between the homogenizing cultural diet of mainstream media and the pluriverse of edge-walking creative performance that holds us humans in the delicate balance of stability and aliveness. It’s a role I’m trying to take more seriously.

Atlanta Fringe because isn’t it compelling to get to see what your fringy neighbors have been up to in our basements and attics all winter?

What inspired you to create this?

As a trans person who has contemplated taking hormones and having surgery for years, I found myself totally shocked when, as I was finally diagnosed with endometriosis in 2021, I met my treatment options – hormones or surgery – with complete outrage. I was appalled at the ethos of western medicine that wants to fix broken parts of the body by shutting off entire systems or better yet cutting them out completely. I’ve spent too many years learning to love all my bad parts. I didn’t want to be fixed. I wanted to heal the issue at the root.

This show comes directly out of my practice from 2021-22 blending Terapia Nierika with nightly dream practice (aka death practice). Every night I would ask to be shown what I was healing in dreamtime. Every morning I would offer the terapia to whomever showed up in the dreamscape the night before. It didn’t take long to find a pattern of illness across both waking and sleeping dreams: it turns out that the root of the illness that is endometriosis is at the heart of many illnesses bred from the roots of colonial violence and racialized capitalism.

This show is an artistic gesture at what I’m learning about how to give them all a good death.

Life has been weird the last few years, to say the least. How has the “real world” affected the art you’re creating?

I’m thinking a lot about erotic power in this season of my life. I have very little political power, as evidenced by all our soft bodies we’ve thrown into the maw of U.S. empire while genocide rages on. Moving instead with creative, life-making power invents a future out of todays’ griefs.

Much of this show draws from or takes place in the dreamworld, which is a nightly source of creative material with which I have been able to cultivate a strong relationship even in times of social isolation, weaving the sleeping dream and the waking nightmare to make sense of our shared reality.

What have you learned from working on your show so far?

A question I ask myself almost daily! I could talk about what I have learned about my body as I’ve been in this creative x healing x dream practice. I could talk about the parts of my spiritual practice that like getting put onstage and which are too sacred and mundane to share. I could talk about making puppets and stage lighting. I could talk about getting intimate with group digestion and deep study inside of protest and grassroots movement strategies.

A mysterious stranger asks to meet you and your cast and crew after loving your show. In your WILDEST DREAMS, who is it? (Bonus points if your mysterious stranger is an Atlanta celeb.)

Ohh definitely someone from Sky Creature Productions or XPT or any other freaky performance makers of Atlanta looking to collaborate on more ritual theater!

and/or the caravan of faeries and friends who want to bring the production on tour.

Fringes are the place to really push the boundaries so we gotta ask: are you inviting your family to this show are “Hey, maybe sit this one out you guys…”

I take big risks in this show. The fam is invited… but have been prepped, haha.

But seriously, this show seeks to be the kind of theater that makes us a better community afterwards. I know this is possible because of what has transformed inside of the characters that are my family on the stage that is our lineages.

Will your show change the world?

I’d like to think it’s a humble contribution. May it impact just the right people in just the right ways.

AI: the death of our art form or just a new tool to create?

I send my blessings to all who are fighting for algorithmic justice in this emerging metaverse, and I’m looking to the technoanimists for guidance about how to relate to this round of the collective consciousness waking up to itself.

For now, my intentions are to continue accessing prophetic intelligence through the technologies of prayer and divination. As far as I can tell, the singularity already exists on the spiritual plane.