Helena Bettancourt

In lieu of a plane ticket from LA to Bogotá, HERO Theatre offers audiences the much more affordable and low-emission option of venturing into the mountains and rainforests of Colombia as a viewer of Diana Burbano’s new play, Luzmi. Devised and directed by HERO founder and producing artistic director Elisa Bocanegra, the play follows the eponymous young woman, Luzmi, as she returns from the United States to her birthplace of Colombia. There, she experiences the country’s abundant natural biodiversity as well as human threats to it, and embraces the communities that rely and care for it.

Luzmi serves as the inaugural production of HERO’s Nuestra Planeta, an initiative with the goal of generating new work about environmental justice issues in Latine countries. To prepare for and ground Luzmi in reality, Diana and Elisa took trips to Colombia and conducted years of research. Elisa, who is Puerto Rican, fell in love with the country, and Diana, who is Colombian, got to see a completely different side of it. I had a chat with them to talk through what took to put Luzmi together—what inspired it and how it inspired them right back.

Elana Luo: Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about the genesis of Luzmi.

Elisa Bocanegra: I started Nuestro Planeta because I wanted to create a project that was reflective of what I was experiencing during COVID. I had suffered a great loss – I lost my brother – and I know a lot of other writers in our community and theater makers were really experiencing a great amount of sadness because all of the theaters were closing.

So once the airports opened, I got to go back to Puerto Rico and I started to write in nature. I started to go into the mountains, outside of the west coast of the island where my family’s from, [and to] the beach. I just immersed myself in nature in my homeland, and that was helping me a tremendous amount. I was losing my brother, watching him die over the course of 18 months—over Zoom because the hospitals were closed—and my only solace was nature.

I came back to LA and I thought to myself, “What if I created a program where I brought writers back to our ancestral homelands, and they can heal from the effects of COVID, from the effects of not being able to practice their art, and from the trauma that we have had to experience being artists of color in American theater? And what if we sought out nature in a place that we are not seen as others, and create there?”

Elana: Did you decide to work with just Latine writers?

Elisa: I knew from my studies that communities of color, especially Latine communities, are greatly affected by the climate crisis in California. I know that many of our Latine people are on the front lines of agriculture, [part of] workforces that cause us to be outdoors, experiencing that kind of punishing heat that the climate crisis has made happen.

We pay extra attention to narratives when they’re our own.

Elana: How did you land on Colombia for the first piece?

Elisa: I thought it would be great to start with Colombia, because it’s the second most biodiverse country on the planet, and the first most biodiverse country that’s Spanish-speaking. Diana and I had worked on another project at HERO, and I read in Diana’s bio that she was a Colombian immigrant. I was like, “Hey, I have this project, and I really think you’re so cool, and I like your writing so much. Do you want to take this commission on?” And so that’s how Luzmi started.

Elana: I heard there were some trips to Colombia that you took for research?

Elisa: I chose areas in Colombia based on some science research that I had done. The first was the Andes Mountains, outside of Risaralda, which has the highest amount of endemic bird concentration. Orchids grow there, and there are more butterflies there than anywhere in the country. And then the other part was that Colombian side of the Amazon rainforest. That was the first trip. After that, I asked Diana, “Do you feel like you have enough to get started on on this?” And she said yes. And I said, “Okay, I’m going to apply for a Fulbright to go back to Colombia and to do some more research”

Elana: How did that turn out?

Elisa: I didn’t think that I would get a Fulbright. I was like, “I’m in an online MFA program. I’m never getting a Fulbright.” And, you know? And I got it. I sent a letter to Instituto Humboldt, which is Columbia’s largest biodiversity research center. And I said, “I’m an artist, I have HERO Theatre, I have this initiative. I would love to come and be in residence there. I can provide theater education based on your science studies.”

They took about six months to write back, but they wrote back: “Sure, come!”

And so I was sort of like “the theater lady.” The biologist would come in and say, “We’re working in a community that we’re studying wetlands, or butterflies and insects,” and I would try to create theater for that community about the science work that they did. So that’s a long story, but I went back, Diana came back, and then we did the second part of her research studies.

Elisa Bocanegra, Diana Burbano and community members traveling through the Amazon – Photos by Andrés Felipe Jiménez

Elana: What was that second trip like?

Diana Burbano: That second trip was steeped in actual communication with the actual people who live there—the people who are experiencing the day-by-day, the people who actually look at and own those parts of the Amazon, who belong there. And it’s a completely different experience. Seeing from a tourist’s eyes versus from those of the people who live there is really, really different.

Elisa: And then the biologist who took us through the Amazon Andes, Felipe Jiménez—we fell in love, and he’s now my husband.

Elana: Wow!

Diana: So maybe part of the story, maybe might have possibly been influenced, slightly, by—

Elisa: —by Diana saying, “Go for it, go for it!” And I’m like, the shyest—I got no mojo when it comes to boys, I never have! I’m a geek. My head has always been buried in theater books. And Diana was like, “Go, hang out with him tonight!”

Stephanie Houston and Peter Mendoza in “*Luzmi”* – Photo by Aaron Gallegos

Elana: That’s incredible. Diana, what were the trips to Colombia like for you, personally?

Diana: One of the most intriguing and important things that happened was sort of the ability to be there as a Colombian. It was literally being able to explore it knowing I belong there, but also with brand new eyes. That was really exciting. Going to Las Amazonas was eye opening, I mean, because it’s something that you read about and see in National Geographic Magazine, but to actually go and experience it—it starts seeping into your bones. You can see the climate change happening in front of your eyes. I mean, it changed my life.

Elana: Can you put into words what that shift was?

Diana: It’s a shift of responsibility. When you look at something—like you see it in a museum, or documentary, or whatever—you feel a lot of sympathy and empathy for it. But you’re always at a remove. When you’ve actually been to these places you can’t take yourself out of it. You can’t go back to looking at single use plastic anymore, because you’ve been there, you’ve seen the actual impact. And hopefully one of the things that we can do with our work is giving people the sense of what it feels like to really, really understand.

Elana: How did you go about connecting that with people at home in LA?

Diana: A lot of the times you get a commission and they’re like, “It can be inspired by or it can be this and that.” But we really did research and we really had things that that were important to to convey to the audiences, especially to our Latine audiences here in LA. I think so many Latine people want to be connected to nature. You find a lot of people who live in the cities with their little patches of land that they tend and their one fruit tree. And I feel like it’s bridging that connection between your own patch of land and the big patch of land that is the earth.

Elisa: Like a reconnection of sorts, right? Because our ancestors were deeply connected. Before lands were taken away, but that’s a whole ‘nother subject.

Emanuel Lorca, Stephanie Houston and Peter Mendoza in “Luzmi” – Photo by Aaron Gallegos

Elana: Elisa, how did you prepare to direct this piece?

Elisa: One of the reasons that really made me want to stay in Colombia was the fact that I am Puerto Rican, and I didn’t know enough about Colombia.

That’s one of the big mistakes they make in American theater. They’re like, “Oh, this person’s Latina, this person could direct that. That person’s Asian…” And we’re all from disparate cultures and countries. We’re not all the same. [Diana and I] embraced the similarities that we have, but I didn’t feel that I was equipped to direct a Colombian play, so being there for the two years really, really helped me.

Elana: How did that work with other members of the production?

Elisa: I also knew that the cast would not all be Colombian. We definitely strove to have as many Colombian actors as we could; half the cast is and half isn’t. That’s another thing about American theater. We just love to cast everybody in everything, but how do I direct actors to have a cultural sensitivity for the communities that they’re playing?

We can bring in an intimacy coordinator, but this is another element I consider to be very intimate. What is that sensitivity we should have? How do we work on this together? How do we make it so that the actors from the native homelands are feeling honored, and also feeling included in the building of the ensemble? So that’s something that I really wanted to do.

Elana: Luzmi was definitely a joint effort with the two of you working very closely together. What insights do you have from your experiences with creative collaboration?

Diana: Don’t be precious about your stuff. Don’t think you’re so great that you can’t reach out to somebody else and work with them. Because sometimes I find that people feel like, “This is mine, it’s only my thing—I don’t want to share it with anybody.” And yeah, there’s definitely pieces like that, but sometimes it’s okay to go ahead and expand your universe as far as how you write and how you create.

Peter Mendoza, Helena Bettancourt and Stephanie Houston in *“Luzmi”* – Photo by Aaron Gallegos

Elana: What’s your perspective from the other side, Elisa?

Elisa: For me, we have an infestation in American theater: It stank. It stinks! If we keep saying you have to have a Pulitzer in order for us to commission you, we’re not taking enough chances on playwrights from underserved communities.

I think what’s happening with a lot of our bigger theaters in America is that we’re not investing in community, and we’re also not giving credit to the subscribers. They actually want to discover. If I find a writer and I connect to the writer’s voice and I connect to them as a person, then I give them the opportunity to create a new play here at HERO.

Elana: It’s not all about pleasing every person in the audience.

Elisa: I’m less concerned about the finish line or what a critic would think and I’m more concerned about the collaborative experience that we have as writer, producer, director and actor in the room, and the healing of artists. I want a safe playground. Our artists have been so harmed in American theater. What I want HERO Theatre to be is that place where artists feel nurtured and we can create together, and the preciousness of what the finish line product has to be… that’s taken away.