VOLUME 107, ISSUE NO. 15 | STUDENT-RUN SINCE 1916 | RICETHRESHER.ORG | WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2023
Weston Twardowski uses theatre to spotlight environmental issues HADLEY MEDLOCK
ASST. A&E EDITOR
FRANCESCA NEMATI / THRESHER
Rice Management Company terminates leases for YoYo’s, Oh My Gogi BRANDON CHEN
FOR THE THRESHER
On Dec. 27, 2022, Rice Management Company notified YoYo’s Hot Dog and Oh My Gogi their leases to operate in Rice Village will be terminated effective Jan. 31, 2023, according to an email obtained by the Thresher. Morgan Lera, investment manager for Rice Management Company, which is responsible for the university’s endowment, oversees Rice Village. “Rice Village created an opportunity for temporary popup tenants to operate within Rice Village parking lots for the last several years,” Lera wrote in an email to the Thresher. “Parking needs are becoming more critical as Rice Village continues to attract a diverse mix of national and local tenants and, as a result, the temporary pop-ups are scheduled to close.” Kevin Dang, co-owner of YoYo’s Hot Dog, said that the notice came as a shock. “When we first got the news that Rice was kicking us out, we were incredibly panicked,” Dang said. “Our general focus week by week is just making sure that we’re able to have the number of ingredients ready to serve our customers. That’s usually our most common concern: operations. We never have to worry about anything other than that. Now, we have to worry about where we are going to even operate in addition to our business.” In the mid-1980s, Rice University began buying land in what we now
know as Rice Village. Throughout the last few decades, RMC made large purchases to consolidate the Rice Village district. Over the years, property management has changed hands a couple times, landing on Houston-based REIS Associates LLC in 2019.
When we first got the news that Rice was kicking us out, we were incredibly panicked. Kevin Dang CO-OWNER OF YOYO’S HOT DOG
“The new management company came in, and they started revamping a lot,” Dang said. “They moved us around a few times in the past few years, and they also changed our lease to an annual lease as well. The reason why they did that was … they phrased it like they weren’t sure [where] they’re taking the development of Rice Village to, so they wanted to keep their options open and keep us only on an annual lease temporarily. And so we were like, ‘Okay, well, we have no choice.’” Dang said that they tried negotiating with RMC after the notice was given. “We asked Rice if it’s possible that we can move to a different corner of Rice [Village],” Dang said. “We’re very mobile. We just want to
make sure that it fits both Rice and ourselves. They’ve just basically told us, ‘Hey, no, we don’t see you developing with us. So unfortunately, we’re ending this relationship.’ So it definitely shocked us to our core.” RMC declined to comment on the future of Rice Village. Many Rice students expressed shock at the news of the closures. Renzo Espinoza, a Wiess College junior, said that when he heard the news, he decided to take immediate action and created a petition on Change.org, which has accrued 4,500 signatures at the time of publication. “I hadn’t seen any other petitions or any other means of which to reverse the decision, at least from a student perspective … so I … literally made it on my phone in like, 30 seconds, and then I just posted it in our Wiess group chat and it just started spreading,” Espinoza said. Christi Nguyen, Jones College senior and Houston native, recalls going to YoYo’s in high school. “I grew up in northwest Houston, and in high school, YoYo’s Hot Dogs was known as a must-try institution,” Nguyen said. “Every so often, my friends and I would make the 40-minute drive and wait in sometimes hour long lines to come visit and every time it felt like YoYo’s was so proud and happy to serve us their one-of-a-kind hot dogs. And to know that it was a local, Asian business, it made me even prouder to be served by it.”
SEE YOYO’S, OH MY GOGI PAGE 2
Both on and off the stage, theatre has long been a part of Weston Twardowski’s life. From professionally acting to directing shows to co-founding his own theatre company in Los Angeles, Twardowski has made his love for the stage into a living. Now the program manager of the Diluvial Houston Initiative and lecturer in theatre and environmental studies at Rice, Twardowski finds his passion for theatre and academic research intertwining with a pertinent issue — environmental justice. “[As] I continue to think about the research topics that interest me, it’s very much tied to how my research can also move beyond an academic readership and into public change,” Twardowski said. “[A] site that I’m very passionate about for that is in any kind of environmental work, environmental justice [or] climate justice. And some of that is art making, and some of it is really thinking about what an artistic approach brings to the kind of advocacy and activism we care about.”
The more that my research went into thinking about environmental catastrophe, the more climate change just became kind of inescapable in my headspace. Weston Twardowski THEATRE AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES LECTURER
After graduating from Northwestern University with an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in theatre and drama just last year, Twardowski was able to utilize his dissertation to delve into this intersection between performing arts and environmental activism. “And so [the work that] really grew out of my dissertation research project was on post-Katrina performance in New Orleans, and thinking about how places that had been through environmental catastrophe use arts and performance as a method of healing community and kind of reestablishing civic identities within the area,” Twardowski said. A native of New Orleans who lived through Hurricane Katrina, Twardowski has long turned to theatre and art as a source of healing, restoration and community, and considers it an educational tool. “I lived through Katrina [and] was very much in the aftermath of Katrina. How I put my life back together was making art,” Twardowski said. “Some of the most important work being done by some really impressive advocates and activists in the city of New Orleans, and some really incredible nonprofits, are done by artists.”
SEE TWARDOWSKI PAGE 8