Marc David Pinate has been selected by the Borderlands Theater Company Board of Directors to succeed founder, Barclay Goldsmith, as the company’s new Producing Director.
Pinate has been working at Borderlands for the past year as an artist in residence. Before officially beginning his new post on November 15, Pinate will be working with Goldsmith during his transition to retirement after 29 years leading the company to prominence.
“Borderlands commitment to new works that reflect the diverse voices of the U.S./Mexico region has been key to its success and national reputation. Our mission is even more important now as shifting demographics push Latinos evermore into the national conversation” Pinate said.
Originally from Chandler, Arizona, Pinate began his professional theatre career in the San Francisco-Bay Area with Teatro Visión, in 1996. For the next fourteen years he worked with a number of important Bay Area theatre companies including El Teatro Campesino, Campo Santo, The Magic Theatre, and Shadow Light Productions. In 2006 he received a three-year directing residency at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, California where he founded the Hybrid Performance Experiment (HyPE), an interdisciplinary performance troupe. The HyPE came to some notoriety for their guerrilla performances on commuter trains, shopping malls and other public spaces.
Apart from his theatre credits Pinate is also an accomplished spoken word poet, winning the 1999 National Slam Poetry Championship and having fronted the spoken word and music ensemble, GritoSerpentino from 1998 – 2006, which toured in Tucson on several occasions. In 2010, he relocated to Chicago to get his Master of Fine Arts in Directing in 2013 from the Theatre School at DePaul University. While in Chicago,Pinate was privileged to work with award winning companies Victory Gardens, Steppenwolf and American Theater Company.
Pinate is married to playwright and actor, Milta Ortiz-Pinate, who is also his collaborative partner. They have a two year old daughter, Sol. In 2013 he returned with his family to his home state of Arizona to begin work on a docu-theatre project about the banning of Mexican American Studies classes in Tucson.
Same Mission, New Strategies
Borderlands’ long history of socially relevant programing is what drew Pinate to work with the company. He will continue to work under Borderlands’ existing mission.
Along with the Mexican American Studies docu-theatre project Pinate recently spearheaded an oral history initiative that will use the testimonies of former residents of Barrio Libre – the Mexican-American enclave that was demolished during the construction of the Tucson Convention Center – to create a site specific play production which combines performance, collective memory, and cross-sector partnerships.
Both the ethnic studies and oral history projects are efforts by Pinate to excavate the rich narratives, historical and contemporary, that exist in Tucson. “I believe theatre should play an integral part in maintaining healthy and sustainable communities. These new projects at Borderlands Theater reexamine how, where, and most importantly, why we make theatre,” said Pinate.
“We love our long-time, loyal patron base and don’t see why they wouldn’t continue the journey into Borderlands’ next chapter. It’s also important to bring more Latinos to our shows to better reflect the ethnic demographics of Southern Arizona and ensure the long term stability of the company,” Pinate stated.