THE PIECE
111 Fires and a Flood at the Guatemalan Natural History Museum is an investigation into theatrical truth as told by the fires of a heating planet. The fictional story follows 15-year old Oscar, a teenager on a field trip who'd rather be literally anywhere else, especially at home with his mother Nadia. His father, Dennis, died last month while responding to a fire, and Oscar doesn't understand why he has to go back to school as if nothing happened. During a field trip to the Museum, a jungle rainforest diorama spontaneously combusts, quickly getting Oscar into trouble. Strangely, the pattern of the burnt diorama matches the stories from the field that his father used to tell him, and Oscar suspects something else is afoot....
Woven from interviews with firefighters who braved the historic, 75-all-at-once, 2024 fire season in Guatemala; online comment sections; rumors about government conspiracies; 111 fires... asks what's it like to listen in a catastrophe when the air doesn't let us breathe, let alone speak.
THE ARTIST
Khristián Méndez Aguirre is a queer, Latinx, award/winning multi-hyphenate theater artist/scholar. His work weaves theater, academic scholarship, Latinx cultural practices, and environmental justice. He's an ecodramaturg, an arts-integrated facilitator/educator, a prolific grant-writer, and a playwright/director/producer. He's an alum of the Candela Fellowship, Eugene O'Neill Theatre, Double Edge Theatre, Glass Half Full Theatre, College of the Atlantic and UT Austin. His work in theatre and environmental justice is influenced by his background in environmental activism, work at the United Nations, training in contemporary techniques of theater-making, a robust history of arts-based projects for environmental justice, and a global education. khristianmendez.com