Etudes / Estebanico

Etudes / Estebanico

An operatic spectacle about an obscured American figure involving singers, dancers and electronic media.

Spanning millenia, centered on Estebanico as an alternate American “founding father” myth. Created and composed by Paul Pinto. Performed with Texas State and San Marcos community members.

Inspired by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's surrealist 16th century odyssey and narrative across ‘America’, this multimedia opera refocuses American mythology and national identity on the titular African sailor, faith healer, and explorer. 

Estebanico (also Mustafa Azemmouri) shared the role of captive and conquistador with his three white Spaniard companions when they shipwrecked in La Florida in 1528, becoming totems, legends, pirates, preachers, and problems of American history, identity and democracy. 

The work centers Estebanico, a young man kidnapped in Morocco, enslaved, shipped across the Atlantic, who then became a key protagonist in a four-person journey from Tampa through native Texas communities to Mazatlan starting in 1528. Themes include storytelling, enslavement, the borderlands, migration, healing, digging, community, unfree labor, indigenous authority, Afro-Latino erasure, native presence, manumission, early culture-contact, and (mis)translation.

There will be a talk-back with Paul Pinto and the performers after the performance.

Etudes Estebanico is part of a renewed interest in the possibilities provided by the mythology and ‘facts’ surrounding founding figures before the 21st  century, including Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, Rhiannon Giddens’ Omar, Shaina Taub’s Suffs, Michael Friedman’s Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Gabriela Lena Frank and Nilo Cruz’ El Ultimo Sueño de Frida y Diego, Nolan’s Odyssey and Paul Pinto’s Beowulf.

The talk back is part of a longer tradition of incorporating audience participation into subsequent performances, an experiment that includes Joe Papp’s Public Theater, Ernesto Buenaventura’s Teatro Experimental de Cali, Commedia dell’ Arte and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.

Sponsors: The Center for the Study of the Southwest, Department of Theatre and Dance, The Wittliff Collections, Department of History, and The College of Liberal Arts

Paul Pinto, creator and composer, hailed by the Wire as  “one of the most exceptional composers in new music, with a sensibility that can handle deadly seriousness and wicked humor”, Paul Pinto creates and preforms multi-disciplinary opera-theater and installation.  Some highlights include Patriots with Jeff Young,  Whiteness with Kameron Neal, an ongoing re-arrangement of Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives, and his first opera Thomas Paine in Violence. He's a founding member of the Collectives Thingy and Varispeed and has performed internationally and on and off Broadway. 

I often spend months dabbling in self-portraiture that sparks intimate dialogue about identity. As an interdisciplinary performer and wordy operatic sermonizer, I'm a curious and exploratory artist obsessed with choral armies, floating heads, verbal gymnastics, immersive and durational encounters, subtly sexual reverb, strong (maybe manipulative) gestures, hyperbole and biting self-reflection. Inspirations and influences including borderlands, people who work in bodegas, the [great] state of New Jersey, Boyz II Men, Raven Chacon, The Ink Spots, Outer Space, immigrants, and the American public school system.