Hortense Gerardo describes herself primarily as a writer. With a background as an anthropologist, she writes plays about modern relationships, culture, and what the world may look like post-pandemic. Hortense also has experience as an artist working with film and movement.
“Art is something you cultivate the way you cultivate any ability, like sports, or any other kind of skill,” Hortense says. “A lot of people assume, ‘Oh, you're either born with this artistic talent, or you don't have it.’”
Hortense Gerardo grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and spent childhood summers in Quezon City in the Philippines. She moved to Boston to attend Boston University. She has spent most of her adult life in the Greater Boston area and on Cape Cod.
In this episode of the BOSFilipinos Podcast, Hortense shares what inspired her to start writing plays and where she finds inspiration. You can learn more about her work at hortensegerardo.com.
Listen to the full conversation below, or subscribe to our show on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify.
Transcript
[MUSIC]
Kaitlin Milliken: Hello, and welcome to the BOSFilipinos Podcast. I'm your host, Kaitlin Milliken, and this show is obviously made by BOSFilipinos.
In each episode of our podcast, we highlight a different aspect of Filipino life in the Greater Boston area. So today we’re back to talk about the theatre, as well as dance, writing, and pursuing the arts with Hortense Gerardo.
Hortense describes herself primarily as a writer and a playwright. She is also an anthropologist and has experience making art through movement and on film. She grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and spent the summers with family in Quezon City in the Philippines. She attended Boston University and has spent much of her life since in Boston and on the Cape. Today, she is also spending time in California leading a program at UC San Diego.
And with that introduction, thank you so much Hortense for being here.
Hortense Gerardo: Oh, you're very welcome. It's my pleasure.
Kaitlin Milliken: Great. So super excited to talk to you about your journey as a writer, how you ventured into plays and the arts. So just to get started, what inspired you to start writing and then start writing plays?
Hortense Gerardo: Oh, what started me writing plays, it actually was a very clear moment in my head. In the summer of 1997. I was at an art exhibition in Vienna, and it was called “Angel Angel.” And it looked like an innocent enough exhibition. I went there, because the publicity showed a painting by Andy Warhol of Jackie Kennedy. And there were several images of angels. And I was there with my son, and we were wandering around, looking at all the paintings and sculptures. And at one point, he ran away from me and ended up in a tiny side room of the gallery. And when I found him, he was staring transperfect transfixed at a very large work that involved a young girl about his age and a gun. And I won't go into detail, but it was a shocking image, to say the least. And I remember at the time taking his hand and leading him away, and trying really hard not to convey my shock and anger that there had been no warning signs whatsoever to allow me to make the choice of whether or not I wanted to allow my five-year-old son to see that image.
But at the same time, around that time, the photographer Sally Mann was being vilified for the portraits of her children, and the NEA was embattled in contestation, with the performance artists caring Finley about first amendment rights and freedom of expression. And I remember being really torn at the time about how I felt about these issues. Because as an artist, I'm very supportive about the right of freedom of expression, particularly artistic expression. While on the other hand, being a parent and wanting to protect my child from violent pornographic imagery that passes itself off is high art.
So I was really grappling with these two sets of feelings. And that summer, I took my very first playwriting class at the University of Edinburgh. And the teacher really just invited all of us to write about the things that make us angry or scared or confused. And I wrote my very first piece there, and it received the staged reading and was performed during the Edinburgh Festival, and I just got hooked on the craft. So that really started me off and ever since then, playwriting has a way for me to get down on paper, some complex issues that I feel like I personally need to work out. And, yeah, that's been my MO.
Kaitlin Milliken: I'm sure not everyone has really an idea of like, what goes into writing a play. Can you talk a little bit about your process? How do you come up with ideas and get them from being in the idea stage to being performed?
Hortense Gerardo: I don't have a regular pattern about how I approach what I write about. Oftentimes, it'll be something that I will read in an article or I'll hear on the radio or see on film and TV that really gets me thinking. Again, it's always something that has me really torn and something that I feel like I need to work through in my own head. And the way that I work it through is through these voices that end up being characters in my plays.
I'm really drawn towards, I guess, issues and also people who are very complex, who were also grappling with these kinds of questions. So I guess that starts the process, it'll start with an idea that really hooks me. Or it will be a person or a character that is intriguing. Sometimes I'll just hear a snippet of conversation. And that'll get me thinking about what's their backstory?
Kaitlin Milliken: Thank you so much for sharing. I know that you sort of touched on writing as being a way that you're processing your emotions. Can you talk a little bit about some of the subjects that are in your place and the topics that you cover?
Hortense Gerardo: I've written about the complexities of modern day relationships. Not just romantic — filial and familial. Because by day, I am an anthropologist, and at heart, I'm really interested in the human condition, human stories, and human relationships. So for me, the storytelling is born out of those relationships and the occurrences that happen, you know, within people's lives.
Part of what I love so much about the theater is the sense of its ritualistic aspects, both on an everyday scale and in the epic scale. And I find that when I am in the theater, I have a real sense of that feeling of ritual that kind of distinguishes itself from everyday life. So everything just feels heightened.
Kaitlin Milliken: I do like that idea. That's part of what makes going to see shows such a moving experience. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the projects that you've done, or that you have in your pipeline? I'd love to hear an example of some of the characters that you've written, or the storylines that you've put yourself into.
Hortense Gerardo: I've been really fortunate lately that a lot of the projects I've been writing have been commissioned works. And so oftentimes, there will be a theme or a subject that I'm asked to write about. I just recently wrote a new play for Fresh Ink Theatre, and the theme was Boston in ten. And when I was invited to write something, I was so honored. It was really in the summer of 2020, when the end of the pandemic was nowhere in sight. And we were asked to write how we envision Boston in ten. And they said that ten could be any way you interpret it, years, days, months, epics. I ended up just landing on 10 months. And as it turned out, even though I wrote it a year ago, I'm actually writing about now.
I wrote about now, and how people would be being introduced into the world, trying to establish a sense of normality. Again, trying to get back to the before-times, which may never happen. So that was one project.
And I'm working right now on another project with Flat Earth Theatre on something called Seven Rooms: the Mask of the Red Death, and seven of us playwrights were selected to write our modern day interpretation of one of the rooms based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story, “The Mask of the Red Death.” I asked for and was given the orange room. So I've written a new horror play. I'm relatively new in the horror genre, but I've been really having fun with that, which is very related to a commission that I got from Umbrella Stage Theater. They were very interested in a one piece that was in the horror genre. So I wrote a piece for them called “Incantation.”
It's all over the map. I write about the stuff that I love to write about, things that just catch my interest. And then I'm fortunate enough to get commissioned to write.
Kaitlin Milliken: Obviously, our show talks a lot about culture, given the nature of it. Can you talk a little bit about your Filipino identity and if that influences your writing at all?
Hortense Gerardo: It is interesting that it took me so long to actually begin to embrace my Filipino identity. I think growing up in the States, in which my family were really the only people of color. In that environment, I didn't really see myself as a person of color. I just assumed I blended in with everybody else. And I don't think I actually recognized that my identity was distinctly different than anyone else's. It's only in retrospect, that I'm actually seeing how my identity has been shaped by the intersectional challenges of being a Filipino in a predominantly white suburban community. And I can pinpoint the time when it finally dawned on me.
Actually, it was in 2014, the year of Tamir Rice's shooting, I was visiting my family for the Thanksgiving holiday. And I learned about the shooting because the traffic was jammed. There had been a protest that blocked all the traffic on the highways. And the more that I learned about the incident, the more outraged I became. And I became determined to write something about it. And then after I had done a lot of reading and research, it dawned on me that I can't really write about this event with any kind of authenticity, from any other standpoint, then from being a Filipino, who was raised in Cleveland. Not part of the African American community, but certainly a person of color. And it was at that moment that I started writing my first real play about the Filipino American Experience called “The Token Filopians of Middleton Heights.” And it was the first time that I really leaned into this recognition that we were different.
Even though I didn't realize it at the time. And all those things that made us different are part of what made up for some very funny scenes, and also some sad and tragic scenes. And, that was my first reckoning with my Filipino identity. But after that, you couldn't stop me. I ended up writing what's right now a trilogy of plays about the Asian American, Pacific Islander, and specifically Filipino experience.
But you know, I have big dreams. I'd like to expand that beyond a trilogy, I'd like to think I'm writing a cycle that will span like a century. I would aspire to something like what the late great August Wilson had done for the African American experience. So I'm really, I'm really now just really embracing that. And I'm loving it. I'm finding that the writing just happened so organically, when I'm finally embracing that and not trying to write like… I started writing in Edinburgh, and I kept thinking, all my characters have to sound like they're from the UK and have these British accents. It was horrible. No wonder they weren't getting produced. [LAUGHS]
Kaitlin Milliken: I think it's so interesting how hometowns really influence our cultural experiences and sort of the lessons people take when they move on and grow up, out of wherever they were from.
Hortense Gerardo: Well, I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. So I have a very Midwestern American sensibility. But my parents also would bring our family back to the Philippines every summer. So I became used to this kind of schedule of academic years in the US and summer vacation in Quezon City. And I think that was my earliest introduction to my life as an anthropologist.
I'm a card carrying anthropologist, and I think the legacy of all that childhood travel is that I never felt entirely home in either place. I was always the observer, a kind of outsider looking in, but also kind of like passing in both situations. So, um, yeah, I consider myself a Midwestern kid. But I moved to Boston to go to Boston University. And most of my adult life has been really around Boston and Cape Cod with holiday visits to family in back in Cleveland because most of my family is still in the Cleveland area.
It's only also very recently that I took up a position in San Diego so now I have another home base in San Diego, which is really eye opening because there's a huge Filipino community here. And it feels like home. And I appreciate it a lot. But you know, I also like being, like we call it the token Filopians of Middleton Heights. I grew up in a suburb called Middleburg Heights. And, the term Filopians came about because I was introduced as a Filopian inadvertently by my American girlfriend who didn't know what to call Filipinos. And I was so Americanized, I didn't know what to call Filipinos. So when she introduced me as a Filopian to her mom and dad, I just went along with it. I was like, “Oh, yeah, I'm Filopian.”
Kaitlin Milliken: You're balancing so many different identities — anthropologist, playwright — different geographies that you're splitting your time between. How do you navigate that, and how does having all of these different sides of yourself influence your creative process?
Hortense Gerardo: I was trained in a very multidisciplinary way. My doctorate was in both anthropology and the performing arts. So right then, and there, I was given an excuse to be able to balance the social sciences and the humanities. And then I was very fortunate enough to land a joint appointment as a faculty member at La Salle college for very many years. And then now, I'm heading up a very brand new program in something that's just a confluence of all the things that I love, which is the anthropology, performance, and technology program. It's the first in the country. And I have to hand it to the visionary thinking of my dean, and the faculty at UCSD to be willing to really pursue this very multidisciplinary way of teaching and educating our students.
Kaitlin Milliken: I'd love to take a quick dive into some of the other types of performance that you have done. So I know that your work includes not just writing but also film and something that you've referred to as movement. Can you talk a little bit about your experience in both of those mediums, and what that looks like?
Hortense Gerardo: I am very keen on making sure I don't refer to myself as a dancer. I'm not a dancer, I came to dance very late in life when most dancers are retiring. Practically speaking, I didn't actually start regularly dancing until I honed in on my anthropology subject as a master's student — a graduate student. I was really interested in drum communication. And I wanted to understand how it worked. And it wasn't until my first field trip to Africa that I realized, “Oh, women aren't supposed to be drumming over there. The women are supposed to dance. And the men are supposed to quote, unquote, supposed to be drummers.” And so the only way that I could study the drumming was if I were to learn African dance. So that's really when I started doing dance.
And then I started to get acquainted with other people in the dance community of Boston and all the different forms of dance. And I ended up doing my doctoral work on a study of the survivability of dance companies. It was really a way to see how nonprofit organizations survive. And then I got invited to perform with one of the dance companies with Deborah Butler's Kitsune Dance Theater. I loved learning about the dance of darkness, or Bhutto, and I started developing my own forms of movement that incorporated storytelling, and sometimes spoken word and sometimes movement.
Kaitlin Milliken: That's so interesting. It's so great that you've gotten the chance to explore all these different creative pursuits. Which brings me to my closing question for you: What are some things that listeners can do to unlock some of their own creativity, even if they're not trained as an artist or a dancer or a writer or in the theater?
Hortense Gerardo: Some of the most disciplined people I know. And I know a lot of scientists, people who are engineers and doctors. But the most, I think, disciplined people that I know in terms of practice are artists, and the artists who I admire the most are ones who have found a way to make art a part of their everyday life. Even if it's just to sit down and write a little bit every morning or late at night, or, some of the dancers who always find a way to be in the studio on a regular basis. Art is something you cultivate the way you cultivate any ability, like sports, or any other kind of skill, because I think a lot of people assume, “Oh, you're either born with this artistic talent, or you don't have it.”
I am a poster child for the fact that no hard work, diligence and a kind of reverential dedication to the craft, is really what being an artist is about. And you better love it, because it may not pay. It may. You don't do it in this country, unfortunately, with dreams of getting paid a lot of money. Some people are, but if you go into it with that aspect, I think it might be a fraught journey. Choose something that you love to do. Find time to make space for something that gives you joy, and that is art in itself.
Kaitlin Milliken: Wonderful. And I think that's a great note to close our interview on. Thank you so much for your time.
Hortense Gerardo: I really enjoyed talking with you.
[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]
Kaitlin Milliken: This has been the BOSFilipinos Podcast. I'm your host, Kaitlin Milliken. Music for our show was made by Matt Garamella. Special thanks to Hortense for joining us. To learn more about Hortense’s work, you can visit hortensegerardo.com. The link will also be in our show notes. If you liked this episode of our show, you can subscribe to the BOSFilipinos Podcast on your streaming platform of choice. You can also follow us on Instagram, @bosfilipinos, to stay connected. If you have ideas of what we should cover, you can let us know at bosfilipinos.com. Thanks for listening and see you soon.