Today's Features

A massive football player, his uniform black, heavy, robotic, runs through a modern city, a flutter of torn books beneath spiked shoes.

He carries a graduation cap in one hand, stolen from the head of a statued scholar, the other hand extended in an evil claw toward a group of diminutive young children sitting at simple desk — a hawk ready to pluck his prey. The city ignores the indignity; it crowds the horizon with shiny righteousness, a new stadium earning center stage, separating education from progress.

Before I could afford a car, I walked as fast as I could those mornings I was late for work. I jumped over the cracks in Carnegie Park’s sidewalk, letting my eye catch the echo of sun against lone blue spruce.

Before I owned a cell phone, my afternoons resonated with natural silence, with only the crack of frog and cricket against ear. Before I bought a computer, my hands knew how to hold a pen, how to round my letters with legible panache. Today, my body forgets the simple, the sane.

‘The reason I agreed to do this interview is because I exist. I am not a myth,” says 78-year-old Emilio Coca, a once crypto- and now practicing Jew who traces his fractured family history back to the Diaspora ignited by the Spanish Inquisition.

Coca’s life story is one of many woven into A Light In My Soul/Una Luz En Mi Alma, a new drama created collaboratively in an unlikely partnership between a the New York-based Tectonic Theater Project, choreographer and director Krista DeNio and the Working Classroom ensemble, a theater company based in Albuquerque.

A tiny gray rock outlined in craggy black paint rolls against a stack of comic-book Stonehenge slabs.

The stones expand in an exponential arc, a burst dam of yellow-red emotion mixed with icy blue spikes. The large abstract expression calls to mind subdivision sprawl, the furious cell-division chaos of mother earth egg and tractor sperm. Las Vegas artist Dakota Mills’ oil painting, “Reproduction,” asks the viewer to step inside the collective hive mind — an unsettling place of highway noise and microwave energy.