Rita Indiana: Tu nombre verdadero

On April 15, we will host this event in person and tickets are free. 
Registration is closed for this event as it is sold out.  

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Tu nombre verdadero is a live performance, with music and lyrics by Rita Indiana and libretto and direction by Noelia Quintero-Herencia. A post-pandemic abstract tale that visits experiences of illness and death in the context of artistic practices and their markets, the piece was commissioned by Americas Society after the couple moved to New York City in 2021. Quintero-Herencia, who also designed the sets, conceived the piece as “a system of goodbyes, the lights and shadows multimedia machine we would need to be able to look at things that are difficult to portray, such as loss.” 

The songbook, arranged for piano and drums with Luis Amed Irizarry, departs from Rita Indiana’s storytelling and popular music staples reaching into “uncharted places of my musical memory, the sounds of early childhood or how I remember them, a time before I knew what death meant.” Musical genres are approached in their bare-bones form, stripped of irony or fusion, as if death had also kissed them. 

Tu nombre verdadero was created out of the need to share an intimate space with those of us who were left behind, a need to memorialize the departed outside of social media, in the present, where the living remain. 

Rita Indiana is a Dominican-born New York-based music composer and a key figure in contemporary Latin American literature. Her novel Tentacle was the first book written in Spanish to win the Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers in 2017. She is the author of five novels and a driving force in experimental Caribbean popular music, receiving a nomination for a Latin Grammy in 2021. Currently, she is the Director of New York University’s MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish. 

Noelia Quintero-Herencia is a Puerto Rican filmmaker, multimedia artist, and researcher. During the 2000s, she created, directed, and produced the Suncoast Emmy winning documentary series on Puerto Rican art and culture Prohibido Olvidar. She wrote and directed the documentary on urban art La Motora Roja tiene que aparecer (2008) and the film PAPI, which won the Dominican Soberano Award for Best Film in 2020. She is the longtime collaborator of Dominican writer and composer Rita Indiana for whom she has directed several music videos and performances. In 2021, her documentary Ellas, mujeres en la música, won her another Suncoast Emmy. Her work has been exhibited at the Centro León, Proyectos Ultravioleta, and at the Leslie-Lohman Museum.