Even Cowboys Get the Blues is a multidisciplinary movement-based performance with 3 performers and 12 puppets who reimagine the cowboy archetype as a hot-mess mascot of American contradictions. Through puppetry, choreography, video, and song, three performers take a rodeo ride through the digital wreckage of manifest destiny straight into a TikTok therapist’s office on death row.

The work is a mish-mash of the American past and present, following the spider-web of lies that must be spun to create a national identity. Cowboys draws on my own experiences as a queer Brown person who has lived in rural, big-city, and suburban US and my love and disdain for each of these landscapes. It asks, “how has capitalism made colonialism a comfortable, safe experience?”

Narratively, the piece is a puppet-filled joyride that follows an 1800s masked cowboy recounting his past crimes to a modern-day talk therapist who cajoles him to assimilate to the boons of capitalist self-actualized living. As he sinks deeper into myth, a commodifiable mental spin-cycle of the cowboy's renegotiation of self unfolds.