10 Questions with Professor Lián Sifuentes
By Charlene Lee '10
Theme Song: "Modern Love" by David Bowie
Karaoke Song: "D'yer Maker" by Led Zeppelin
Favorite Book: "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel García Marquez
Favorite Film: "Labyrinth"
Favorite Play: "Medea" by Euripides
Favorite Quote: "Don't dream it; be it" from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"
Something people would be surprised to know about me: I’m the lead
singer in a band. And I don’t sing.
When I was in college, I ... worked like a slave and partied like a
rock star.
Most prized possession: Stiletto heel signed by shoe designer John
Fluevog.
Thing I regret most: Going blonde.
When I first meet Lián Sifuentes, the new drama department assistant professor, I almost mistake her for a student. She arrives to the interview directly from a costume fitting for the recent production of “Romeo and Juliet,” in which she plays Romeo’s best friend, Mercutio, explaining: “Since this is a modern take on the play, I’m playing Mercutio as female. Playing the role as female is interesting because it allows you to really look at different relationships, particularly Mercutio’s relationships with Romeo and Tybalt.”
Sifuentes grew up in a western Massachusetts environment she describes as a “haunted house, Emily Dickinson, dark gray aesthetic.” She initially became interested in theater because she enjoyed “inhabiting another persona” and gaining novel perspectives through the roles she played. She attended UMass-Amherst and majored in theater, but found herself wanting more. “Although I really enjoyed theater, I felt limited by always being directed by someone else and telling someone else’s story,” she says.
She received two masters degrees at NYU: one in performance theory and the other in interactive telecommunications. At NYU, Sifuentes began to see technology as a metaphor for performance. “I started to become interested in technology in performance, which was something I never expected. I found that I wanted to see not what technology is in performance, but how technology affects the way we make connections between things, or how our minds think in networks and not straight lines.” She continued working on performance projects and spent four years with the Trinity/La MaMa Experimental Performing Arts Program in New York City.
Currently, Sifuentes teaches performance studies and digital media classes that examine everything from online social spaces, to the history of performance, to stop motion animation. She classifies her courses as either being “deep investigation of performance” or as “practical art making” classes, involving more hands-on work. She hopes, however, to incorporate both techniques into all the classes she teaches at CC.
One course Sifuentes is teaching is Latin American performance, which examines “theater as resistance” through plays written between 1950 and 1980, and focuses on how theater functions as a coping mechanism for oppression. She explains that for many oppressed individuals, “theater can be the only way to articulate problems, hold people accountable for actions, and resist oppression.”