Horse Tail Trails

To a ten-year-old girl growing up in the projects in Cleveland, a field trip to see a play probably didn’t seem like a big deal at first.  She had no way of knowing at the time the true significance this simple event would have on her life.  She and her class mates sat in the audience, shouting and throwing things.  Her attention, however, was fixed on the thin line of light under the closed curtain.  The house lights dimmed, the theatre quieted (if only slightly,) and the curtains finally slid open.  The cast of adults and children began to unfold their tale to the audience and the young girl had an epiphany.  “It was like it hit me like – I don’t know what, like a flash or like lights in the sky. ‘That’s what I’m gonna do!’”  This is the story of how Rosalia Triana started on her path to become an actress.

Triana was born in New Mexico, though she did not stay here long as a child.  She was raised in Cleveland, Ohio.  Her mother was Latina, her father Italian, but at this time, these were not things that were widely advertised.  “This was the ‘50’s,” Triana reminds us, “People wanted to be American.”  Like many families, they were avidly chasing ‘the American dream.’  Being thought of as immigrants was no acceptable and becoming mixed up in something as radical as theatre was certainly not something her parents approved of.  “I had to constantly do other things on the surface, like I was ‘normal,’ and meanwhile, I was doing that (acting), too.”

It should come as no surprise that, as an artistic mind in the time period, Triana spent some time driving about the country in a VW bus with a friend.  They had no plan, simply a desire to drive westward until they reached the ocean.  Their travels eventually lead them to the state Triana was born in.  “As we drove into New Mexico, I had this rush of something in my heart that was like,” she gasps in surprise, “Home!  I had never felt like I was at home in my whole life.  It’s never gone away.”  

Triana started out finding places to act in the state, but she could tell very quickly that she needed to do more.  “I saw people who were like third-rate hacks who were passing themselves off as great theatre artists.  They were charging money and all this stuff and I thought, ‘wow, I don’t wanna be like that.  I don’t wanna be somebody who’s just ripping people off.’...  I thought, ‘How am I gonna find out if I’m good enough?  Well, I’m gonna have to go where the good people are and test myself.’”  

At the age of 36, with $500 in her pocket, Triana was New York City bound to prove herself as a performer.  She hitched a ride in the back of a pick-up truck with some people who were moving.  She didn’t personally know anyone in the city, her only connection being the father of a friend who said she could stay in his loft a few weeks until she was on her feet.  

“For three years, I auditioned a lot and I was in a lot of really weird, way off-Broadway—” Triana interrupts herself to stress, “So far off-Broadway, you didn’t even know they were in the city kind of things.  So I did a lot of these weird plays… after three years, I started getting calls for work.  I never really had to audition again.  I just would get calls.  People would see me audition somewhere or other and they would remember me and liked me and called me.  That was interesting to do, I didn’t know it worked that way.”  

“Coming up in theatre, it was always like, as my professor would say at UNM, ‘dead white guys.’  It was always classics… That’s what I learned, that’s what I knew, that’s what I did.  I had no idea that there were plays written by and about Chicanos or Latinos.  And it was a huge discovery.  So when I was in New York… that was the first time I realized I even had a culture.  I connected to the people who were doing it in NY, cutting edge stuff, radical stuff.  And that got me turned on to it.”

Triana did many films with small rolls, which paid the bills and helping her to do what she really loves; working with the community.  She did a program with New York Transit Tech to teach the children acting and play writing.  These were children who had been labeled as troubled and were being taught to work in the transit system of the city.  The majority of the school was boys with only a handful of girls.  “The first day that I came up out of the subway there, on the first day that I went, it was like a bombed out place… it was horrifying.”  She did improvisation work with the kids, letting them play rolls from their lives in the bad neighborhoods, helping them safely act out emotions they were suppressed and helping them to write their own plays.  Seeing such hopeful stories come out of troubled teens confirmed for Triana even further that this was her calling.

Another awakening came to Triana when she was called by a big casting agent to be an understudy in a Broadway production.  “It turns out that on Broadway they were going to do the play ‘Death and the Maiden,’ which is written by a South American play-write about Latin people in South America.  But they were calling me to understudy because the characters were being played by Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss and Gene Hackman… They were calling the top Latino actors to be understudies.”  She realized that, as a Latina actress in the day and age, she wasn’t going to land major roles and had basically reached as high as she could get in the business.  “That was when I thought, ‘You know, I should go back to New Mexico where I can have much more impact and I can get young people to go out in the world… I can just be especially more meaningful there.’”
 
In 1994, a representative of the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin called her with an invitation to direct the play ‘Dustoff’ by Bruce King.  Triana had previously directed this play in 1979 at the writer’s request, and she continues to put on this production about the Vietnam War every so often.  The agreement with Oneida was that they would pay to fly her there and then to fly her back to New York at the end of the summer.  “That night I called them back and I said, ‘Listen, will you fly me there, and then fly me to New Mexico after?’ And they said, ‘Sure, you set up the ticket and we’ll pay for it.’”  After eleven years in New York and a summer in Oneida, Triana finally flew back home.

With her Master’s Degree in theatre, Triana taught at Northern New Mexico College for a time.  In the back of her mind, she always wanted to start a community theatre in Espanola.  An avid believer in the power of art, especially for the youth, she’s helped establish many art spaces, such as the Armory for the Arts in Santa Fe.  The opportunity to do something similar in Espanola finally presented itself.  

Triana is currently working with a group of people to create the Mel Patch Art Space.  Located on the corner of S. Riverside and E. Corlett Road in the Espanola Y Business District, the building was formerly a bar known as Mel Patch.  In a more recent incarnation, the place was a body shop, then it lay empty for some time.  The floors currently need replacing and there’s a lot of work to be done to the building, but it has two wide-open rooms and a performance stage, so it is perfect for the needs of the group.  Above all, she wants to provide a place for the youth to come and express themselves.  “The beauty of working in your community is you see people blossom and grow.”


Other projects Triana has recently been a part of include an arts in the schools program with Moving People Espanola at the JHR Elementary School, and promoting the movie she wrote, “Epi’s Dilemma,” which has been accepted into every film festival she’s submitted it to.  The Mel Patch Art Space is in need of volunteers and you can contact her through her business directory listing: Click Here


BIO:
Favorite color: Purple in any way, shape, or form
Favorite music: Almost all music – folk and punk
Favorite writer: Cherrie Moraga  and Gloria Amvaldua
Favorite time of day:
Favorite time of year: Fall
Pets: 3 dogs, 6 cats
Languages: English, good with Spanish
Education: BA Theatre MA in Teatro Chicano
Favorite annual New Mexico events: cars shows; Halloween fav holiday
Chili: [x] Red  [x] Green (red in winter, green in summer)
Favorite quote: “Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further” - Rainer Maria Rilke, LETTERS ON CEZANNE