Mami

Mami is a solo performance that challenges the conventions of what we assume about essential and migrant workers. It’s about the people who clean our bathrooms, who maintain public hygiene, whose acts of service give us the freedom to go about our lives, day in and day out.

Drawing inspiration from Victoria Santa Cruz’s spoken word poem, Me gritaron negra, this semi-autobiographical theatrical experience delves into the intergenerational curses between mothers and daughters. Performed primarily in English, this intimate piece explores lineage, healing, and the lived experience of a Black female identity.

October 2, 2025 at 7:30 PM

I first saw the beginnings of Mami some years back and immediately I knew that Isi was an artist to watch. Their presence, poetic text and raw energy on stage takes you into a world that is often in the shadows. In the afterhours while we sleep, others clean those places that we will return to after the day breaks. Isi’s work introduced me to Victoria Santa Cruz and the power of a community of Afro artivists in the Americas.

Beatriz Pizano, Aluna Theatre Artistic Director

About the artist

isi bhakhomen – Playwright/Performer

Magda “isi bhakhomen” Uculmana-Falcón is a storyteller of Afro-Peruvian and Nigerian descent. Their work as an artist spans many different mediums. Through stories they aim to build worlds that give black folks the freedom to breathe, to laugh and to heal. 

desirée livingstone – Director 

desirée is an artist, which is to say: a professional dream-conspirator. She thinks with her hands and builds with her brain, reversing the usual order of things. Her work asks how we might live together with more spirit, and dares to rehearse those answers out loud.

Her hands are restless: they direct, devise, teach, learn, and beckon others into the practice of dreaming, no matter how unruly or fragile those dreams may be.

She is a professor of theatre (U of T) and borrows her research practice from the Land: listening for what is hidden beneath the surface, tending to what has been buried, remembering what refuses to be forgotten. For desirée, theatre is ceremony as much as craft. It is an embodied dialogue with ancestors, with the more-than-human world, with futures seeded in the soil of now.

Theatre is not just performance but possibility: decolonized, embodied, epic. It is both a method of survival and a spell for a future that hasn’t arrived yet.

Jessica Zepeda – Stage Manager

Jessica is a multidisciplinary performance artist born and based in Tkaronto (Treaty 13) with roots from Kuskatan, post-colonial El Salvador. They are a part of Native Earth’s Animikiig Creators Unit 2024/25 season and is a Buddies in Bad Times 2024/2025 Queer Emerging Artist Recipient. In 2024 and 2025, Jessica has shared excerpts of their solo, mi historia que no es única, a Contemporary North/Central American folk horror that blends experimental jazz, and recorded testimonials and is centred around an entity that is haunted by her parent’s undocumented journey from El Salvador to El Norte. mi historia que no es única has been apart of The Weesageechak Begins to Dance 37 Festival, The 46th Rhubarb Festival, and The 3rd Edition of the MxM Encuentro de Danza Contemporánea based in Tuxtla/Chiapas, Mexico. In summer 2025, Jessica had their contemporary dance debut in Toronto, performing in Xilopango by Irma Villafuerte, Co-presented by DanceWorks and SummerWorks. Stage Manager credits include: Otros Rostros – Uxbridge Studio Tour 2021, TAOS The Art Of Storytelling – Why Not Theatre’s Riser Toronto 2022, TAOS The Art of Storytelling: Song Cycle Series – Rumble Theater’s Tremors 2023 Festival in Vancouver, Chez Moi – 2024 Rhubarb Festival, Surrendered Spirits by CinnaMoon Collective – Debut at Dance Immersion’s Double-Bill Presentation May 2024.

Samay Arcentales Cajas – Projection Designer

Samay Arcentales Cajas is a Kichwa digital media artist and video designer exploring human-land relations, the new media dimensions of indigenous cosmology, and immersive art as a site of liberation. Her works have been shown across Canada and internationally at ImagineNATIVE, Xpace Cultural Centre, Tarragon Theatre, TQFF, Prague Quadrennial 2023, Performance Space New York, among others. Samay has won awards in two consecutive landJAM+ (Eastside Games Choice Award in 2022 and Best Execution of interactive project in 2021). Samay also wears many tech hats working on projects across the country and supports her family business, Pacha Indigenous Art Collection.

Kalale Dalton-Lutale – Dramaturg

Kalale Dalton-Lutale is a Black queer playwright and performer originally from Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work embraces experimentation, mothers, nostalgia, loss and pop culture. Some of her plays include Pinky Swear, i am entitled to rest, and The Adventures of the Little Girl and The Wind. Her work Crybaby can be found in From the Ashes – an anthology of six Black solo plays edited by Shauntay Grant. Kalale is a graduate from the National Theatre School of Canada and a recipient of the RBC Tarragon Emerging Artist Award. She is currently the Associate Artistic Director of Factory Theatre.

Alejandra Nuñez – Sound Designer

Alejandra Nuñez is a vocalist, percussionist, composer, Sound Designer. Mother to Rune and Mathew, Masters in Theatre Studies from York U. Born in Santiago Chile, Alejandra has lived and worked as a musician in Canada and the United States, she has performed in Europe as well as North-Central America and South Africa. Her training on percussion has taken her to Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, New York and Egypt.
Band leader of Latin Jazz Band Projecto Urbano Self titeled CD with Mano Music.
Alejandra has performed with The Toronto Dance Theatre and written scores for various plays, including : Princes Pocahontas and the Blue Spots by Monique Mojica, composer. Adventures of A Black Girl in Search of God by Djanet Sears, Co-Composer, Music Director (Dora MD Nomination). The Kink in My Hair by Trey Anthony, Music Director. The Power of Harriet T! by Michael Miller, YPT. Score, Soundscape, MD Scotian Journey by Anne-Marie Woods. MD, Soundscape. How Black Mothers Say I love You by Trey Anthony, Black Theatre Workshop Production, Music Director. Apocalypse Play by Natasha Greenblatt and Kate Lushington, Sound Design. Terremoto Co-Sound Design. Mami by isi Bhakhomen, Sound Design.

Darren Shaen – Lighting Designer