Acceso controlado.

Teresa Hernández is a Puerto Rican stage artist. Teresas creative projects are characterized by a consistent eschewing of traditional artistic categories. Teresas characters explore and expose the anxieties of everyday life in Puerto Rican society, transversally investigating issues of gender, class and race. Acceso controlado is a multimedia spectacle revolving around the theme of controlled access and the metaphor (and growing reality) of gated communities in Puerto Rico. Five sections comprise this piece, with five characters masterfully performed by Hernández. La Reina delivers a fascist, classist, racist speech, claiming that democratization and mestizaje are crimes against the historic order. The security guard Teniente Cortés talks about the paranoia and false security nets people resort to - controlling access through the now ubiquitous gated communities being one of them - in order to protect themselves form the alarming growth of criminality in Puerto Rico. We later find El Chamaco in Primera Plana, a scene exploring the body language and expressions of the criminal(ized) youth, bringing to the forefront the interplay between will and subjection, the criminal life on the street and the institutional forces trying to control it. A short film follows, titled Milagros Vélez, based on Request Concert by Franz Xaver Kroetz and Act without Words by Samuel Beckett. The last piece, La Primera Dama en Solo Operático en Tiempos Desafortunados completes the performance, with a hysterical First Lady symbolizing the banality of complaint in a society where a financial elite controls cultural expression and politicians hide corruption behind hypocritical civic concern. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics