Performances

The Living Poetry Project

A performance intervention that uses choral speaking and skin-drawn poetry to create a communal voice of resistance in order to change the perception of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Canada.

Biography

Alessandra Naccarato is a poet from Montreal, Canada. Editor of Lip: Politics & Poetics, a quarterly journal of political literature and visual art. Producer of The Public Zine, a grassroots festival of guerrilla performance and autonomous media.

Hip-Hop Theatre: An Evening with Danny Hoch Hip-Hop 

Although Hip-Hop Theatre has proven itself a formidable global arts movement with a large following around the globe, it is still misunderstood and conspicuously absent from major stages. In this performance, Danny Hoch brings together character monologues from his plays Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hopand Till The Break Of Dawn, to illustrate that Hip-Hop Theatre is not as much about the form as it is about the Hip-Hop generation; through spoken-word pieces from HBO's Def Poetry, he shows that issues of race, class, ownership, self-determination, the prison industrial complex, Reaganomics, police brutality, drugs, globalization and technology all contribute to what makes the Hip-Hop Generation all over the globe.

Biography

Danny Hoch is an actor, playwright and director. He founded the Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, is a senior fellow at the Vera List Center For Art & Politics, and sits on the board of Theatre Communications Group, United States.

The Ephemeral Body: A Luxury Death

Anorexia responds to a paradigm espoused by multinational pharmaceutical corporations, the fashion and beauty industries, and companies that make all kinds of diet products. The process of producing brand fashion begins in clandestine factories that hire women at slave wages and ends in catwalks that hire slaves who pay with their death. 
Author: Diana Raznovich / Performer: Pía Uribelarrea / Video: Lidia Milani / Wardrobe consultant: Delia Cancela / Staging consultant: Marga Borga.

Biography

Diana Raznovich is an Argentinean playwright with a long trajectory and national and international recognition. She is also a cartoonist, and haa produced numerous performances and installations with her cartoons. She has been exiled in Spain since 1975.

The Voice of FOMMA 

The presentation—performed by Isabel Juárez Espinosa and Francisca Oseguera Cruz—will be a sampling of FOMMA’s theater work, and will include: 1. Space for Venting/Drunkards at a Bar. 2. Sebastiana Puts her Husband’s Boots on Him 3. Sebastiana Waits for the Doctor. 4. Drunken Doctor. 5. Francisca and Isabel speak about FOMMA. (Directed by Doris Difarnecio)

Biography

FOMMA is a Mexican organization in Chiapas whose mission is to empower Mayan women through bilingual literacy courses (in Tzotzil and Tzeltal), workshops in productive skills, health education, and theater.

Rosa Cuchillo (Solo show by Ana Correa) 

Rosa Cuchillo is a mother searching for her disappeared son even beyond death, wandering the netherworlds. Her return to earth seeks to harmonize life and, through dance, help people to let go of their fear and begin healing their oblivion.

Hampiq Warmi (Healer Woman)

Hampiq Warmi is an experience of art and healing that contributes to the psycho- social rehabilitation of women who were victims of sexual violence in the context of Peru's civil conflict. 
1- Willasaqmi is a performance narrated by two Andean women who connect with their ancestors through an initial ritual, dealing with the role of women in history and the balance provided by their presence. 
2- Kay Punku is a performance based on documented testimonies by women who were victims of sexual violence in the High Andes in Peru, a region hard hit by the violence from 1980 to 2000.

Biography

Yuyachkani is a performance collective that has been working, since its inception in 1971, at the forefront of theatrical experimentation, political performance, and collective creation focusing on embodied social memory, particularly in relation to questions of ethnicity and violence in Peru.

The Argentine Glow, Sports and Social Club

A hundred years of Argentine history (1930- 2030) seen through the social dances of a community club. Directed by Adhemar Bianchi and Ricardo Talento.

Biography

Catalinas Sur is a group of neighbors from the La Boca neighborhood (Buenos Aires) who find in the theater the possibility of comunicating with other neighbors. Through theater they aim to recall the value of their collective and individual stories and also to recover the memory that believes in a better world. A hundred performers – a live orchestra – big puppets.

Sor Juana, Primero Sueño (Sor Juana Striptease)

Jesusa Rodríguez performs a fragment of Sor Juana Ineés de la Cruz’s 17th century poem, “Primero Sueño,” which she confesses was the only poem she ever wrote for pleasure and for herself. As she strips away the levels of the poem, she also strips away her clothes.

Biography

Jesusa Rodríguez is Mexico’s leading cabaret and political performance artist, who ran the famous Teatro Bar El Hábito in Mexico City with her wife Liliana Felipe. She is the recipient of an Obie Award and the first artist named Senior Fellow of the Hemispheric Institute.

The Acts: A few short Lines

The starting point for this performance is the femicide that is occurring on the 
Mexico/US border. It is an attempt to examine the political and aesthetic implications of the consequences of socio-sexual oppressions that remain a brutal reality for sectors of women worldwide.

Biography

Jill Greenhalgh is a performance artist and director from Wales, UK. She is also the Founder and Artistic Director of The Magdalena Project, an International Network of Women in Contemporary Theatre. Since 2002, she has held a full time Lectureship in Performance Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Mapa/Corpo 2: Interactive Rituals for the New Millenium

Poetic interactive ritual that explores neo- colonization/de-colonization through acupuncture and the reenactment of the post-9/11 "body politic."

Biography

In 1993, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes, and Nola Mariano founded La Pocha Nostra in Los Angeles, California. In 1995, La Pocha Nostra moved to San Francisco's Mission District, where it has been based for the last twelve years. Projects range from performance solos and duets to large-scale performance installations using video, photography, audio, and cyber-art.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist/writer and artistic director of La Pocha Nostra. His pioneering work explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, "extreme culture" and new technologies.

Roberto Sifuentes is an interdisciplinary performance artist from Los Angeles, California and a founding member of La Pocha Nostra.

María Estrada is a performance artist and dancer from Barranquilla, Colombia, now living in Bogotá, where she studies art and psychology at the Universidad de los Andes.

Liliana Felipe in concert 

Liliana Felipe performs her repertoire, following the many absences left in the wake of Argentina’s last dictatorship.

Biography

Liliana Felipe is a composer, singer, gardener, tango musician, and clergyphobe. She left Argentina for Mexico just before the military coup in 1976, but her sister and brother-in-law remain among the 30,000 disappeared.

Santiago-Buenos Aires, Visual Binnacle

This is a performative action by Jessica Torres and Julia Antivilo, who traveled by land from Santiago, Chile, to Buenos Aires, hitching rides from truck drivers they encountered along the way. For "protection," they wore electric bras and other apparatuses of self-defense and pleasure. They screened the video documentation of this trip at the Encuentro, and displayed the chastity belts and other devices.

Biography

Julia Antivilo (MA in Latin American Studies, Universidad de Chile) wanted to add performative elements to her writing, so she created an interdisciplinary feminist collective in Santiago with Jessica Torres, Zaida González and Paula Moraga. In 2005, they wrote an essay called "Chastity Belt: A Prostheis is in the Minds of Latin American Women," which they've presented in Chile and Mexico.

Witness to the Ruins

This performance synthesizes, in a non-chronological or linear way, Mapa Teatro’s experience during the process of disappearance of the El Cartucho neighborhood in Bogotá, Colombia. By documenting the disappearance of a place, and the appearance of a non-place, Mapa Teatro seeks to make visible molecular places where residues of otherness remain, traces of that which has been lost, narrations that reconfigure the neighborhood’s memory. Mapa reiterates its interest in inscribing, to the end, its experience as a witness through an artistic gesture.

Biography

Colombian artists, Heidi, Elizabeth and Rolf Abderhalden founded Mapa Teatro in 1984. Since its inception, Mapa Teatro has built a universe within the Living Arts, a place ripe for transgressing disciplinary boundaries, fusing languages and readings, and articulating local and global concerns.

365 Days, 365 Plays

Raphi Soifer got together Encuentro participants to perform 7 short plays from the American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’s most recent work, 365 Days, 365 Plays.

Biography

Raphi Soifer is an activist, performer, arts educator, and researcher from the United States. Since getting his ass kicked by Seattle police officers at the 1999 WTO riots, has been interested in creating performances that explore, redefine, and reclaim public space.

Water of Light

A series of actions based on Oscar Urrutia's research on contemporary Mayan shamanism. The performance consists of bowls made from fruits, filled with water, that project and reflect light.

Biography

Raquel Araujo Madera is the founder and director of La Rendija Theatre Co. She founded the Department of Performing Arts at the Institute of Culture of Yucatán (ICY), and the Research Center for Performing Arts of Yucatán (CINEY), Mexico.

Shared Garden

This performance gathers the names of thousands of people who died or disappeared as a result of the many Latin America's dictatorships and armed conflicts in the 1970's and 80's. Sayuri dyed thousand of popsicle sticks and wrote a victim's name on each; then she sat in a plot of land for hours, planting the sticks in the ground in the shape of flowers, creating a shared garden of memory.

Biography

Sayuri Guzmán is an artist, art critic and teacher in the Dominican Republic. In 2005 she began her exploration in performance art, and has done several performances since then, including En bandeja de plata, Costura para un corazón, and Sin embargo sigue latiendo. She also organizes and curates performance events in Santo Domingo with Arte-estudio, which she co-founded with Clara Camineros.

Flabby (Fofo)

Flabby (Fofo), as folks say, has come to stir things up. Flabby is endless boredom, uninstalled installation, filled with emptiness, holes inhabited by the worms of your fears as Europeans born in the Americas. Flabby knows who you are. Flabby is your own covered mirror. Welcome to Buenos Aires, stand aside.

Biography

Soy Cuyano is an Argentinean Experimental Group for Experimental Thought that resists any classification. It was created 5 years ago by Federico Winer (political scientist), Gonzalo Aguirre (political scientist), Gustavo Simona (lawyer), Diego Urribarri (cultural producer) Diego Ferreiro and Pablo Sternbach.

Retro Perspective / It's a small house and we've lived in it. Always.

Retro Persspective is a short medley of old Split Britches hits that provides a humorous slant on Peggy Shaw's and Lois Weaver's last thirty years of work and play. In Small House, two explorers lay claim to the same territory. These people have known each other for a long time. They occupy a house that has been divided and subdivided by time and bad habits. They sit on a porch, watch the horizon, and wait for the weather to change. Their only hope is an audience.

Biography

Founded in 1981 at the WOW café in New York, United States, the group is part of "Staging Human Rights," where they work in prisons in Rio de Janeiro and England. They are also associate artists on the "Clod Ensembles" performing medicine project.

Lois Weaver is an independent performance artist, director, and activist.Currently, she lectures in Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary University of London.

Peggy Shaw is an actor, writer and producer who has collaborated, written for and performed with the Spiderwoman Theater and Hot Peaches Theater. She is currently touring her new show, To My Chagrin.