Kena León and Miracle Mopera in The Debut, HOY! Productions at RISER Edmonton. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.
By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca
The Debut, the music-filled play premiering this week under the RISER Edmonton banner, lives up to its name in multiple ways, from multiple angles.
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For one thing, it marks the arrival in the world of theatre of well-known musician and DJ Kena León, and the debut of their new multi-disciplinary company, HOY! Productions. For another, León’s debut as a playwright is a coming-of-age story, seen through the queer Filipinx lens, a debut of a different sort.
In Filipino culture, as León explains, a debut, pronounced ‘deyboo’, is a big-deal debutante coming-out party, “a chance for a family to show off their daughter: A dress! A grand entrance! It looks and feels like a wedding.” León compares it to the quinceañera celebrations in Latin American cultures.
Another debut explored in León’s play is the immigrant experience in this country of immigrants. One of The Debut’s two queer Filipinx immigrant characters is a DJ (played by León), “who’s been in Canada for some time and has adapted. The other (played by Miracle Mopera) is a recent arrival, trying to take everything in — a new language, a new culture….” Their connection is latter’s ‘debut’, in the planning stages.
“It’s the story of two people trying to navigate the complexities of their culture while also understanding it’s time to honour their true selves,” says the playwright.
Miracle Mopera in The Debut, HOY! Productions at RISER Edmonton. Set and costume design Rebecca Cypher, lighting by Rory Turner. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.
“As a musician and DJ by trade, storytelling to me started in the form of songwriting. And the first iteration of this play was a 15-minute multi-disciplinary presentation that had a lot of my songs … telling a story of a queer person navigating a new country as an immigrant.”
That’s when León got “a nudge, (laughter) a very hard nudge,” from Mac Brock, the ever-persuasive managing producer of Common Ground Arts, to submit The Debut for development in the RISER Edmonton program, part of a national initiative to provide theatre resources to indie artists. “Fifteen minutes just wasn’t enough to tell the story. Exciting! Now I had the ability to expand it!” And the team that RISER put together, including much queer and Filipinx talent, is impressive, they say. “I was very lucky to have a team with lived experience. Everyone is on the same page.… I’m so grateful.”
Kena León, DJ-turned-playwright. Their play The Debut premieres as part of RISER Edmonton. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.
“Music is integral to The Debut,” they say. “It weaves the story together… and I was able to incorporate my love of DJ-ing (they DJ live before every performance). In addition to the songs, the play is underscored, the work of star composer/musician Lindsey Walker who built her design from León’s set list. “The learning curve was steep; I didn’t come from theatre world. This was the first time I was able to write the script and also work with a whole team.”
Music was inevitably crucial to their first play. It was always part of their life (piano lessons started at age three); “if you’re Filipinx you learn singing and dancing by osmosis; you’re surrounded by it.”
Miracle Mopera and Kena León in The Debut, HOY! Productions at RISER Edmonton. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.
For the play León pulled from their own life experiences, “but fictionalized!”, as a first generation Filipinx immigrant. They arrived in Canada with their family in 1997, age 11 — first Vancouver for six months, then Edmonton mid-winter. “My brother and I were very excited about our first snowfall, then we were O, O, it’s cold!”
Eloquent and lively in conversation, León is perfectly, idiomatically, bilingual. They learned English in school in the Philippines, starting in Grade 1 (“I remember spelling ‘apple’). School learning and real life have their differences, as they discovered. “O my goodness, suddenly this is the language all of the time! That first year (in Canada) I had to translate everything….”
León remembers the feeling of dispossession, of being homesick. “I feel like half my childhood was in the Philippines, half here.” I left at Grade 5; we were all being prepared for high school, and suddenly we moved and it felt like starting all over again. I’d built this community of friends…. My first year of being in Canada I’d still write letters to my friends at home.”
“You mourn a little bit. There’s uncertainty, you’re a bit scared of what’s going to happen. Definitely a shock.”
Kena León and Miracle Mopera in The Debut, HOY! Productions at RISER Edmonton. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective
Being queer and coming out in a “traditional and very conservative culture” where family life is multi-generational isn’t easy, as León knows first-hand. And that tension and anxiety is built into The Debut. “It’s not easily accepted. A lot of queer folk stay in the closet for some time until they feel the family is ready or they have some independence.… There’s fear that when you come out you lose that entire system.”
“It was a huge decision to tell my folks; I’d been mulling it over for years,” says León. “My parents didn’t accept it at the beginning. It was hard; we had to have some distance…. My parents raised me to be honest; I didn’t want to lie. So that was an internal conflict too.”
It was lonely at first. “I crave the family unit, so I had to build a chosen family.” It took a few years,’ they say, “but my dad and I spoke. ‘We’re family, let’s figure this out together. Our beliefs and values may not 100 per cent align, but there’s absolutely no reason we can’t come together in the middle somehow’.”
“Now we have dinner, and I bring my partner.”
For an artist who comes from “music and sound world,” as they put it, what was the attraction of theatre? “I started working as a sound designer for a few shows…. And I found theatre allows the complexities, the many layers, of this story — queerness, coming out, a culture — to come forward. You’d never get that in a song.”
“Theatre is a bigger container for a complex story.”
PREVIEW
The Debut
Theatre: HOY! Productions at RISER Edmonton
Written by: Kena León
Directed by: Amanda Bergen
Starring: Kena León, Miracle Mopera
Where: Backstage Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.
Running: Tuesday through Saturday
Tickets: fringetheatre.ca
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