Oriana Camarena Mejer- Rising Actress (Interview)

Edition Sixty-Nine- Week Sixty-Nine:

Written by: Jacob West

Hi Oriana, tell us about yourself. Where you’re from, your hopes, your dreams, your story!

“My full name is Oriana Camarena Mejer, I’m from a town called San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. I grew up there most of my life, but had an opportunity to live in New York City when I was a kid with my mother. Fell in love with it. Now I’m back and doing everything possible to stay in this city. That’s the biggest dream at the moment: staying, haha. This might sound pretty cheesy but being an actor and an artist was less of a choice and more of a form of survival. After having lived in Brooklyn as a kid, I came back to Mexico to live my teenage years. I was shocked to find that what I had to say was valued less in my own country. Or at least by the people I was surrounded by. New York had taught me to be myself, and there I was suddenly in a box again. New York has the great power of lifting all voices up, there is a culture here of having a huge appetite for life and embracing yourself completely. That is what I was missing back home. I was a bit too opinionated for a catholic small town I guess. Argumentative in classrooms, a loud girl.

My mother is a poet. She made sure to take me everywhere she went to see the world and meet writers from all over the world. I’ve had the enormous privilege of being exposed to people and cultures of all kinds. This is why I didn’t ever allow myself to think I was ‘too much’, I’d seen the ‘too – muchers’, I felt perfectly reasonable in my bigness. I had things to say, and nobody was listening in real life. (No matter how great and perfectly worded my points were.) I was going to burst. There were things to yell about; femicide, house break ins, kidnappings, constant machismo and sexism, animal rights, climate justice, etc etc etc. You get it. She’s one of those, oooh. Our go to trauma response in Mexico is to laugh it off. And that was my way in: comedy. I found that if I made a point sandwiched in between a million jokes… people were more likely to listen. So I turned everything into a joke. A lot of my poetry has started out as that, the absurdity of things, a total joke.

I started getting into acting because I realized that even when problems weren’t my problems, I took things personally. That is not a smart thing to take on… unless you’re an actor. Acting has become the greatest tool for me to understand myself and all the other people I’ve come across in my life.

Even those I never thought I’d ever understand. Beyond the obvious dreams that any actor would have, I think I’m living the dream right now. I have an incredible community surrounding me, I respect their artistic impulses, and I get to collaborate with them. And they’re kind. And I live in my favorite place in the world. The ideal would be if I could make some money out of it and maybe rent an apartment without any rats. That would be grand, to pay your rent doing what you love. And if you’re lucky, maybe a nice one. We’ll see how it all pans out. I don’t want to attach myself to an outcome, thinking in terms of the future has only ever become a weight to bear.

Maybe the bigger dream is to reach a wider audience. Again, there’s things to say.”

You’re a pretty awesome voice actor. What is it about voice acting, and specifically poetry, that appeals to you?

“I think it comes from going to so many live performances of poetry growing up. When I read a poem there are images that rush through my head, and there’s a certain way you can say things that can hit people harder than if they were to just read it. It’s like music. Maybe I enjoy it because I’m a bit of a control freak. I write a poem and I know how it should be read (in my opinion). And were my poem ever to be read with no rhythm or without communicating the images I am trying to communicate…well that would be a problem. This all started when I discovered operative language. How much a sentence can change depending on what word you decide to emphasize.”

What roles do you crave? Anything specific?

“Nothing specific. Something fun. Something I’ll learn from. Oh. Good writing, please, for God’s sake. The phrase that was nailed into my head during my time at Stella Adler was “Growth as an actor and growth as a human being are synonymous.” It’s true, she was totally right. If I can learn from it and I don’t think the writing is vomit worthy, I’m in.”

I understand you had a film go to the Cannes Film Festival! That’s amazing, can you tell us about that?

“Yeah! It was totally by chance. I uploaded my film “I’m Mad As Hell And I’m Not Going To Take This Anymore” to YouTube a bit willy nilly. It starts out with a clip from The Network (1976). An NYU professor happened upon it and really loved it. His name is Peter Terezakis, he has since become a giant supporter of my work and a friend. He’s also an artist and climate activist, you should check him out. Anyway, he loved my film and encouraged me to submit it to a couple of film festivals. It ended up winning a couple of awards and getting screened at the Follow the Carbon Film Festival at NYU Tisch. I later found out that because I was placed in the festival that it also meant it would be screened in Cannes as a part of their International Cell Phone Cinema Showcase. It’s incredible really, I’m not sure I’ve even digested it properly. But it’s all thanks to Peter.”

What do you hope audiences will take away from “I’m Mad As Hell And I’m Not Going To Take This Anymore”?

“I sincerely hope people do exactly that, get mad. Our discomfort pushes us forward. We keep making informative boring videos as if it’s information that we lack. Wolfgang Tillmans talks about this in his edition of Jahersing, What is dif erent? Cognitive dissonance is plaguing our society. I hope people begin to use their own critical thinking and their own set of values to incite change. Today it is clearer to me than ever how often we are lied to and manipulated by the… let’s call them the ‘big guys’. There is a genocide unfolding before our eyes and the media is bending the truth or lying to us completely. On both sides! On all sides! Thankfully we have access to the internet, which means we have access to footage and live first person accounts of everything. It gives us the opportunity to engage with people in those situations directly. I talk about this in my most recent work “NOISE!”.

Although it’s great that we can hear these first person stories, we continue to be manipulated by our spoonfed algorithm, which only shows us what we want to see.

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
– Henry David Thoreau.”

As an actor, you collaborate a great deal with musicians. What draws you to that? What’s next for you? Are you working on anything?

“Music is my strongest connection to my father. He introduced me to The Beatles, The Who, rock and roll, blues, jazz, Silvio Rodriguez, all kinds of music as a kid. We don’t talk a lot because we’re both living our own lives but we send each other songs. I think music is its own language and its own form of communication. I could disagree with a group of people about all sorts of things, but the second someone starts blasting Mr. Brightside you know we’re all going to be bouncing, holding each other’s shoulders and scream-singing in each other’s ears.

I put music over my poem films because music intensifies life. And therefore music intensifies everything. So why wouldn’t it make my poem better? DJs take people’s heart rate into account when they’re making their setlist. The second you add a rhythm to something it inevitably connects to someone’s heart. Literally and non-poetically speaking. You’re connecting to people’s bodies, directly.

Currently I’m working on seven different projects, but one you can expect soon similar to what we’re talking about here will be “Tutto Passa”. A poem I wrote on the same night I wrote “NOISE!”. It’s going to be another collaboration with the incredible musician Sofia Test Camarena. She’s already scored a bunch of my other poem films and has done an impeccable job at it. This new film talks about how everything is temporary, and how that makes everything more special.

I’m also producing and acting in a show this December with a collaborative of playwrights called ‘By The Fire’. And you can catch me in the next production of “MOSCOW MOSCOW MOSCOW MOSCOW MOSCOW MOSCOW” at the Herbert Von King Cultural Arts Center in January. Come check them out!”