Producer, Co-Creator
La Princesa is a documentary play that investigates the struggle between Pedro Albizu Campos, leader of Puerto Rico’s Nationalist Party, and the FBI; which accused the party of terrorism. Utilizing manifestos, speeches, FBI files, and other documents, this play puts together historical pieces that have been distorted through the years.
La Princesa is the inaugural project of devised collective Bad Boy Sad Boy.
It was first presented at CalArts LatinFest in 2018, and won the Arts + Activism Award from ArtChangeUS in 2019.
“This is not a pretty story.
If it helps you to understand the world in which we live, then I have done my job. ”
Bad Boy Sad Boy is a collective formed by multi-disciplinary artists Jorge Luis Figueroa, Salmah Beydoun, Omar Madkour & Sophie Blumberg. We founded this initiative in an effort to talk about the mechanisms through which politics operate.
We feel the necessity to face the reality that is afflicting us. As artists hailing from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Egypt, and the United States, we all come from countries bound by political repression. We aim to create universal meaning by refracting history through a variety of media that includes performance, film, and installation. We begin with stories that are rooted in a single culture or moment in history and then find the common ground within it. In our process, we create an artistic language that is both in conversation and confrontation with the histories we unearth. We unpack the concepts of truth and truthfulness, and, in doing so, we reframe the ways in which we understand the world we live in. The rest is up to you.