Poetry leaves the page and takes to the stage on Saturday, June 20, when poet, performer and educator Camille Hernandez presents “Motherlands” at the Sierra Madre Playhouse at 4 p.m. Part of the playhouse’s Authors @ the Playhouse series, the performance reimagines Hernandez’s celebrated chapbook as a choreopoem — a form that fuses movement, rhythm and language into a single, living expression.
Rather than reciting from behind a podium, Hernandez animates her poems through gesture, breath and motion, weaving text and the body into one fluid performance that draws on the traditions of spoken word, performance art and dance. The result, the playhouse promises, is poetry as something visceral and alive.
“Motherlands” explores themes of diaspora, belonging and inheritance — what it means to carry many homes within one body. Across the work, Hernandez navigates identity over generations, languages and geographies, treating the parallel journeys of motherhood and migration as acts of love shadowed by quiet loss. It is, at its core, a meditation on the many places and people a person carries inside.
Hernandez serves as the Poet Laureate of Anaheim and is a published author whose work centers the inner lives and intimacies of marginalized women. Her chapbook “Motherlands” was a finalist for Finishing Line Press’ New Women’s Voices series.
For an audience, the evening offers a rare chance to experience poetry not as recitation but as performance — emotional, embodied and immediate.
“Motherlands” featuring Camille Hernandez will run on Saturday, June 20 at 4 p.m. at the Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd., Sierra Madre. For more information, call (626) 355-4318.
