ABOUT
What happens when your great-aunt, your only connection to your cultural roots, your only connection to your history, lies on her deathbed? What's lost? A person? Language? The special ingredient in all her recipes? Remembrance?
Toasted Marshmallows is a film, performance and community building project chronicling two mixed-race women’s attempt at uncovering the cultures we were separated from. Anoushka Ratnarajah and Marcelitte Failla grew up far from the curry and gumbo that stewed on their grandmothers stove. On our journey to regain what was lost, we will meet and interview other mixed-women and ask what it means to be "authentically" rooted in one's culture and how we maintain ties in a world of assimilation.
In the summer of 2012, Marcelitte and Anoushka were both fellows in The Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics’ Emerging Artist Program. It was during this intensive program that we realized the parallels in our experiences. We both feel there is a profound lack of engagement with mixedness in the arts, social organizing and education, and seek to fill that void with our own voices and the voices of other mixed race women.
Toasted Marshmallows on stage was first performed as a work in progress at La Mama Theatre in New York City as a part of the evening EMERGENYC 2012 Will Have You | Wanting More. It is a multi-disciplinary performance that engages with issues of colour, passing, privilege, ethnicity, ancestry and belonging. In November of 2012, Marcelitte and Anoushka traveled to Chicago to share their work and interview other mixed-race women at the Critical Mixed race Studies Conference at De Paul University. The work in progress was next performed in Sao Paulo, Brazil, as a part of the Transocheo evening performances at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ Encuentro.
WWW.TOASTEDMARSHMALLOWSPROJECT.COM
https://www.facebook.com/toastedmarshmallowspro...
WE NEED YOUR HELP
We will be travelling to Gresham Or, Vancouver BC and San Francisco in August and New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Toronto and Montreal in September to interview our friends and families as well as conduct interviews with other mixed women who have agreed to share their experiences with us. Although people have generously agreed to offer housing, the cost of airfare is a huge burden.
This project is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas so all donations are tax deductible! Just make your donation and Fractured Atlas will send you your receipt.
$3500, alongside generous volunteer support, will ensure that this film is not only completed but shared with those interested in sharing the stories of mixed-race women.
A GROWING MOVEMENT
Toasted Marshmallows is not just a film but is a part of a larger project to build a mixed-race community. Toasted Marshmallows expands on work that is already being done by asking hard questions of the people closest to us and artistically telling the stories of mixed women across the US and Canada.The project is deeply invested in listening to and sharing the stories of others, and in community building. On our journey, we will be holding mixed-girl brunches where we will talk to and interview mixed-women from similar backgrounds.
OTHER WAYS TO HELP
If you can't support financially, please spread the word about Toasted Marshmallows by sharing this campaign on Facebook and telling your friends . If you would like us to come speak to your organization or community group about these issues, you can reach us at: 2TOASTEDMARSHMALLOWS@GMAIL.COM
THANK YOU!
We are so excited to be apart of a growing movement and greatly appreciate all the encouragement and support behind this project!
~Marcelitte & Anoushka
*********************************************************************************************************
Marcelitte Failla, Co-Collaborator and Film Director
Filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist, Marcelitte Failla, was raised in Gresham, Oregon. After growing up in a mixed race family and experiencing the racism of conservative America, Marcelitte committed to producing work that examined and complicated conversations around gender, race and sexuality. Her film Uncovering Color, which looks at how skin-color effects Black communities, premiered at the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival in L.A. and has shown in numerous cities across the U.S. Her most recent film, Under Durham’s Sky premiered in April, 2013 at the San Antonio Q fest and her written work can be found in the anthology Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out. She is currently completing her MFA in documentary film and resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Anoushka Ratnarajah, Co-Collaborator and Film Creative Producer
Anoushka is a queer bi-racial femme, and a bi-coastal, transnational artivist, writer and performer. She was born and raised in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territory. She is a founding creative member of the Vancouver based theatre company Collective Hallucination, whose principal play "Capital, Alice!" was featured at The 2010 Vancouver International Fringe Festival, and Vancouver's Up In The Air Theatre Company's 2013 rEvolver Festival. In 2011 her masters thesis project, a collectively devised, multidisciplinary and audience participatory theatre production entitled Bordering, was featured in the student produced Culture Shock Festival, May 2011, in partnership with The Department for Art and Public Policy at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. In 2012 she was a fellow in the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics’ Emerging Artist Program and has performed and produced work in collaboration with Montreal based theatre company Mischief Theatre and New York/ Massachusetts based social justice theatre collective 2050 Legacy. She has been trained in solo and collaborative performance work, theatre of the oppressed, spoken word and movement, has been published online as a blogger (rabble.ca, shamlessmag.ca, feministe.us) and in print as a literary critic (Shameless Magazine). She has her Masters in Arts/Politics from NYU and currently lives in between Vancouver, New York and Montreal.
WWW.TOASTEDMARSHMALLOWSPROJECT.COM
https://www.facebook.com/toastedmarshmallowspro...
