Meet Jean Carlo Yunén Aróstegui

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jean Carlo Yunén Aróstegui.

Jean Carlo, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
While looking back at it, my story makes a lot of sense to me, I think that the way that I got here was not your straight shot way of becoming a director. I grew up in the Dominican Republic, surrounded by beautiful landscapes. As a kid, I was always fascinated with animals and nature. I would always ask for animal figures for my birthday and would build toy zoos that extended all over my childhood bedroom. For a while, that kid wanted to be a farmer or a dolphin trainer (I used to think farmers only got to spend all day petting animals and that seemed like a very nice life to lead). My parents always encouraged us to follow our passion, so that meant that my older brother also had a lot of support to put on the plays in which I was a willful participant in. I remember having a big box of random costume pieces in the closet, and every Halloween we would dig into it to create our own characters and costumes. While I did participate in a few school plays as well as home plays and videos, growing up I didn’t consider them to be my “main” interest (in part also because it was “my older brother’s thing”. I develop a passionate interest in the arts through photography, a medium in which I was able to mix my love for nature and the arts together, going on photo excursion with my father at a young age and doing landscape photography. I was able to do a few exhibitions together with my dad when I was still in High School.

I moved to the United States for college, to become a field biologist and research animal behavior. I was actually undecided my freshman year between a biology major or biomedical engineering, and I briefly joined the pre-vet club during my sophomore year. But I had missed a creative outlet in college, so I started taking classes first in something I wasn’t too familiar with: film. Because, I thought to myself, if I didn’t like film, I could always go and pick a minor in photography, which I thought could complement well with field biology research. Eventually, I landed in a theater directing class and that was it. Then and there, I discovered something that I was really passionate about. When noticing how big of a turn that would be (and in trying to justify this big career change to my parents), I discovered that the change wasn’t as abrupt as it might seem: there is a natural inquisitiveness in both arts and science that I was deeply drawn into, and I had had a passion for storytelling that drew me to photography and even research, in trying to understand the stories about us that could be told through science, I just hadn’t noticed how it all fell together until the moment that I had to articulate why I wanted to switch majors.

After that, I started becoming involved in more and more theatrical production and expand the scope of my photography, using these two mediums as my entryway to the art of storytelling. I applied to grad school in theater directing and to my surprise, was accepted to UCLA TFT for an MFA in theater directing, a degree which I just completed this past June. While I learned a lot and owe a lot of my training to the school, it was also the perfect excuse to make the move to Los Angeles, a place where I knew I would be exposed to a lot of opportunities and different people that would enrich my artistic experience and contribute to my personal development. I have since been able to work on different regional theaters, being an alumn of the FAIR program at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, co-directing a production at the Los Angeles Theater Center, and being an assistant director for Destiny of Desire at the Cincinnati Playhouse. Now, I’m an LA-based artist, focusing on theater directing, currently serving as an Associate Producer for the Latino Theater Company at the Los Angeles Theater Center. I still maintain a deep connection with my home in the Dominican Republic and am set to have a solo show there next year. I’m also a company member for In The Margin, a theater ensemble focused on telling and uplifting diverse stories.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I’d be willing to say smooth is a relative term. Whether it’s dealing with the set of challenges that are inhering to being an immigrant in a foreign land or small (or big) failures that make you second guess whether you made the right choice, we deal with obstacles at every step of the way. It is lonely at times, and if anything the struggles have allowed me to gain some perspective as to what my goals are and forced me to take a deeper look at myself, forcing me to be comfortable with the person I am. At the end of the day, the struggles become easier when I know that I’m also working towards something that makes me happy to get out of bed and drives me to keep pushing forward. So yeah, there are obstacles and struggles and it is definitely not have been a smooth road, but I feel like the reward of doing something that moves me and to craft interesting stories make it worth it, as if I was putting a blanket over the rocky road, you feel the bumps, but it hurts less.

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I consider myself a multi-medium artist that focuses on directing. While I consider my interest to be pretty vast, at the center of what I do is telling stories that inspire deep connection with ourselves and the world around us. There are two main things that I do and focus on when directing: 1) stories that deal with the individual’s relationship to their community, and how to inhabit their world ethically, and 2) explorations of identity, as an immigrant, I had the opportunity live with this double identity, where I’m perceived as something completely different at home than how I am here, which I have found to be fascinated, so I’ve been drawn to stories that explore the construction of identity and how assign and perceived identity work in the world, which in a way relates back to the individual’s relationship to their community. I seek and want to produce art that goes beyond the intellect, to me, when I experience great art, the feeling is some sort of gut punch that leaves me at a lack of words, it requires an emotional processing that sometimes words can’t express, or that needs too many words.

So I love to make art that leaves the audience either with a necessity to connect further with other audience members or touch them deeply in a new way than they expect them, bringing them to a kind of emotional high. So in a way, if the audience is speechless after an opening night, to me, that won’t be necessarily a bad sign. I think I’m set apart from others in how I bring the different cultures that encompass me into my directing, whether it is my views having grown up in the Dominican Republic, or my Lebanese or Spanish roots, I love a visual explosion of culture on the stage. While I think that text is extremely important, it’s how the text marries the rest of the elements, which I think are influenced by my background as a photographer, that really helps tell the stories I want to tell. The image-making on stage combined with heartfelt connections, to me, the performance is not in the actor, but in the space between the performers, where the energy of their interaction is alive.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
This one is tough… in the arts, or personal? I think when it comes to the arts, success lies in communicating the ideas or inquiries that you started the piece with effectively. It might be hard to define, but let’s say, if your inquiries have to do with isolation, while you can’t control the audience interpretation or reaction, at least their responses are somewhat in the vicinity of that inquiry, if you fail to communicate what that is about, then it’s something to re-evaluate, at least in how I measure the success in my art. When it comes to the personal, I think that success feels like when your cheeks hurt at the end of the day from smiling and laughing, waking up with energy even before the morning cafecito because you can’t wait for what the day is bringing ahead. Success to me is savoring the small moments of joy and of human connection while working in something you love, which in my case, is deeply related to my art, and being able to share that art with my family. Also, being able to use that art to travel, lots of traveling and discovering and experiencing new adventures.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jeancarloyunen.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jcyunen/

Image Credit:
Jintak Han, Rey Jerrell, Jordan Moore, UCLA REMAP, Jean Carlo Yunen A.

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