If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. The concrete jungle where dreams are made of is the subject of Spitfire Company’s new work about art, immigration and integration.
If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere
Migrant artist Mckenzie Tomski is an immigrant to America and the central character of Miss AmeriKa. Tomski grew out of the real experiences of Spitfire Company's Miřenka Čechová, a Czech performer who moved to New York full of the hopes of a young artist. Tomski's dreams, or Čechová’s, were soon crushed, but not before she documented the looming loneliness of immigrant artistry in NYC.
Raised on a bountiful diet of American culture, Tomski wants to make it in the Big Apple, the city that never sleeps, the place that she will live happily ever after…
Part hip hop, rap, slam poetry, ballet and stand-up, Čechová’s performance is sewed with an enigmatic charisma. She's a bolt of electricity with a plethora of talents.
Sadly, the different threads of her performance rarely align, and the audience is left with a sense of disjointed confusion. Perhaps that is what Čechová intends though, as her character struggles to fit into the beat of New York.
Much of Čechová’s angry script and intriguing facial expressions are lost amidst booming music and a projection of lonely snapshots and cartoons of the city, which sticks in odd places. Despite technical flaws, there is an overwhelming energy to Čechová’s performance. Tomski knows her dreams will probably always be just that, but this doesn’t stop her pulsating with enthusiasm for the city and the hopes that it houses in its alleyways and subways routes.
This was a piece born out of social media experiments, and later developed into a book of the same title. Čechová’s observations of the immigrant American Dream and its falsehood is hardly original - however, it is a confident and vibrant piece of work.
