This Italian photographer and her revolutionary art thrived in Mexico City in the 1920s.  She was Frida Kahlo’s lover and posed for Diego Rivera’s murals. After seven years of photography, she abandoned her art to join the anti-fascist cause in Europe, running the Red Aid Hospital in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.

Raised in a working-class family, Tina’s legacy is one of dedication to justice and equality and the four hundred photographs she left behind. She died of a heart attack at the age of forty-five in the back of a taxi cab in Mexico City. Carmen is compelled by Tina’s struggle to reconcile her artistic practice and intimate life with her political commitment.

The play takes place during Tina’s heart attack and consists of twenty-five episodes performed by a seven-actor ensemble. Each episode differs stylistically: film noir when Tina is in 1930s Berlin spying on the Nazis for the Soviets, naturalism when she is at a 1920s party in Mexico City, catwalking when characters are introduced on a runway, etc. The thematic thread is: what is the personal cost of militancy?

Five antisocial outsiders are chosen to be spokespeople for a new development in a small coastal town. The job is a lifeline; a chance to get their lives back on track with a renewed sense of purpose and belonging. But what exactly are they representing? The true nature of the development is a mystery and what first seemed a straightforward assignment becomes a kind of language experiment, a conjuring act, as the spokespeople attempt to speak on its behalf.

Loosely inspired by Goethe’s Faust, An Undeveloped Sound is about the essential wager made between development and destruction. In Goethe’s play, Faust is estranged from the world and deeply depressed. His bet with the Devil lifts him out of despair with a new lease on life – on one condition: for as long as Faust refuses to be content with what is, and strives endlessly toward what could be, he can save his soul from damnation. 

For the spokespeople in An Undeveloped Sound, it’s the verbal impulse – language itself – that becomes the force of salvation: the striving for connection, the quest to say what must be said. If they can sustain this quest in a state of perpetual development, their sense of place in the world will be eternally secured.

Presented as part of Climate Change and Other Small Talk — a theatrical podcast series created by Sunny Drake and produced in association with Why Not Theatre and 9 companies around the world. With our partners, The Cultch, the entire podcast series is hosted on RePlay Series online.

With a satirical tone, Core Artist Carmen Aguirre’s episode Rolling Hills, Green Pastures, will probe the US Army’s “going green” initiatives. Esperanza Soto welcomes new recruits to a U.S. drone centre. Run entirely on wind energy, the centre is part of the U.S. Army’s Green Military Movement. One of the drone operators is a climate refugee from Vancouver. What choices will they make when climate refugees attempt to cross the border from Mexico?

Carmen and Justin Podur met on May 29, 2023, at the Cultch to speak about a number of topics around Climate and how we can make changes.  The video of that talk will be available on our Youtube page soon.