Performances

Donation

Biography

Álvaro Ricardo Herrera has a degree in Visual Arts from the Universidad de los Andes de Bogotá and a Masters in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional de México (UNAM). His work deals primarily with questions related to contemporary cities, their problematic aspects, and their inhabitants.

Black Box

An absolute and voluntary fast for 40 straight hours in silence, in the manner of an exvoto, inside a black wooden box. Juxtaposing the power of the mind with the power of the body, and exercising will power over the need to eat, this work invokes —in the discomfort of confinement— an everyday part of one's personal creative process.

Biography

Álvaro Villalobos is a Colombian artist living in Mexico. He received his Masters degree in Visual Arts and his PhD in Latin American Studies from UNAM. He graduated from the School of Arts at ASAB in Bogotá. His work consists primarily of performances, photographs, videos and installations that link social and political issues to the work of art. Currently, he is a professor at the Acatlán School of Superior Studies at the UNAM and he is the Coordinator of the Research and Post-Graduate work at the School of Arts at UAEM.

White on White (a.k.a. W.o.W. and Win!)

A participatory performance that is a traveling trade show sales booth for the game W.o.W. and Win! Combining commercial names of shades of white interior house paint with the aesthetics, rules, and formulas of the children’s board game Twister, W.o.W. and Win! is a performative investigation of whiteness, power, and the learned social vocabulary of colorism. (Conceived in collaboration with Kim Cowperthwaite of MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA.)

Biography

Andi Sutton is an interdisciplinary performance artist. Independent curator/event producer. Member of collectives: The National Bitter Melon Council and Platform2: Art and Social Engagement. She is a graduate of Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Bizarre Cabaret

Performance mixed with a batucada, in the middle of a theatrical scene with a historical cultural background based on the anthropological sciences of different eras. Hadad's shows consist of fast-paced, fragmented, parodic unveilings of traditional Mexican song, dress, dance, and political satire in which the focus is the female body.  She incorporates elements from Mexican visual arts, music, and cinema, along with actions and gestures from popular culture.  Her intensity on the stage as she sings, dances, and throws barbs at Mexico's Sacred Cows is contagious, and audience members can often be seen dancing in their seats.

Biography

Astrid Hadad was born in Chetumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico.  She graduated from the Centro Universitario de Teatro after deserting her studies in Political and Social Sciences at the Universidad de México. Hadad uses cabaret and performance to represent social, cultural, and political crisis in Mexico and, in turn, to entertain.  Since rejecting institutional support and affiliation early in her career, Hadad has written, produced, managed, and promoted her own work, establishing audiences throughout Mexico, the U.S., Europe, Australia, Canada, and Latin America, gaining reknown for her shows, Heavy Nopal, La Multimamada, La Pecadora, Seducida y Abandonada, and Corazon Sangrante. As an accomplished vocalist, her albums circulate internationally.

Dead Fields

This piece bears witness to Colombia's recent tragic history. In two scenes, the choreographers capture two ways of perceiving the war. The piece registers in its very structure the fragility and strength of human nature in the face of prejudice, displacement, and forced silence.

Biography

Danza Común is a contemporary dance company, founded in 1992, currently directed by Bellaluz Gutiérrez and Sofía Mejía. The group has its own center in Bogotá and carries out projects involving dance training, creation, and research, and the ways in which dance relates to other disciplines.

Performers: Sofía Mejía, Rodrigo Estrada, Laura Franco, Sandra Gómez, Bellaluz Gutiérrez, Andrés Lagos, Juan Mosquera, Juliana Rodríguez.

Blue

Blue is the result of intensive exploratory work that seeks to highlight the particularities of each dancer while creating an extraordinary and powerful atmosphere. A mixture of dreams and reality, of situations and relationships that can be enjoyed by diverse audiences of all ages.

Biography

ConCuerpos is a collective that brings together professional dancers (with and without auditory disabilities), professors, and researchers, who use contemporary dance to open up spaces for becoming familiar with the body in all its diversity, providing a platform for people with and without disabilities to explore movement.

• Director: Charlotte Darbyshire, invited English choreographer
• Dancers/Creators:Paulina Avellaneda, Christian Briceño, Carolina Caballero, Andrés Lagos, Luisa Martínez, Laisvie Andrea Ochoa
• Original Music: Jules Maxwell, invited composer, and Kenji Ota
• Costume and Lighting Design: Rafael Arévalo
• Set Design: Marvan Helberger

The Dirty Bag

A gigantic bag, made out of 12 garbage bags collected on the streets of Paris, is used as a piece of clothing by several people, and functions as a device to convey the kinds of control, vigilance, and cleanliness that are imposed on urban landscapes.

Biography

Diana Lorena Díaz is a Colombian artist living in Paris. She holds a Masters degree in Fine Arts from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and is currently in her 5th year at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. Her work has focused on the construction of identity by exploring micro-contexts such as family, educational institutions and anonymity.

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

Margarita Borja is a poet, playwright, producer, and director of the Teatro de las Sorámbulas (Spain), founded in 1992 by a cross-disciplinary, cross-generational group of professional feminists working in theater, music, and the visual arts. In 1996 she developed the "Encuentros of Ibero-American Women in Theater Arts," which she continues to coordinate to this day, at the International Theater Festival (FIT) in Cádiz, Spain.

The Debt

The Debt is an account of journalist Matilde Ballester's continuing investigation of the sex trade and traffic of women.

Owner of the Butterflies

FOMMA's collective creation tells the story of Chepe, an orphan predestined by his "wayjel"—the hummingbird—to change the destiny of those slaves who suffer under the despotic regime of the owner of a coffee plantation. The play exposes the despicable living and working conditions of the coffee workers, denouncing the violation of their human rights and demanding that the fundamental rights of these individuals be upheld.

Biographies

Doris Difarnecio is a Colombian actress and theater director from New York. She has been creating and directing plays with FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya) since 1999. Difarnecio got her MA at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain, and she is currently the Director of Centro Hemisférico/FOMMA in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.

María Francisca Oseguera Cruz began her career with FOMMA, working as a cook for the nursery, when the organization was founded in 1994. In addition to contributing to FOMMA's collaborative works, Oseguera Cruz has also written her own short stories and plays. Since 2006 she has been director of FOMMA's executive board.

Victoria Patishtan Gómez joined FOMMA in 2001 and has since written short stories, her own life story, and stories about Tzotzil communities that have been used in theatrical works. Victoria (a Tzotzil speaker) learned Spanish through her job and her writing. In addition to acting, Victoria is in charge of costuming and creates masks for different characters, including animals. She also organizes the photo archive and is secretary of the executive board.

10 Psychomagical Actions Against Violence

In the past years Gómez-Peña and his troupe la Pocha Nostra have examined the human body as a site for radical spirituality, memory, penance, activism, stylized anger and corporeal reinvention. In this performance, the artist explores both the legacy of fear of the Other —the criminalization of the brown body inherited by the Bush administration, and the emerging culture of hope, imagination and faith that has developed in response to the former world order. The piece tackles this historic moment of dramatic reinvention by looking into the immediate past and attempting to manifest a possible future without resorting to quick fixes and false hopes.

Biography

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist/writer and the director of the transnational arts collective La Pocha Nostra. He was born in Mexico City and came to the US in 1978. Since then he has been exploring cross-cultural issues with the use of performance, multilingual poetry, journalism, video, radio, and installation art. His performance work and eight books have contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, identity, and US-Mexico relations. His art work has been presented at over seven hundred venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia and Australia. He is a MacArthur Fellow, American Book Award winner, and a Senior Fellow of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe, and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT).

Cartographies of Memory: Images and Politics

Individual stories articulate collective realities, taking the private photographic and audiovisual archives belonging to the families of militants in the Movimiento político-militar (M19) and of two political movements (A Luchar and Unión Patriótica) and other social movements based in different parts of Colombia. These family members are part of the Movement of Sons and Daughters for Memory and Against Impunity.

Biographies

Manuel Chacón began his academic studies in Sociology at the Universidad de la Habana before returning to Colombia to devote his energies to cultural activism. In addition, through his music, Manuel Chacón has worked with young people in different organizations.

Sandy Morales received her professional training in Social Sciences. The field of Political Science has allowed her to locate the coordinates of power in which reality is constructed. Cultural studies has given her elements for the critical analysis of social constructions, and her involvement in the arts has broadened her perspectives on creative action.

SHOUT!!! a collective gestural patrimony

An outdoor sound installation involving a collective shout, inspired by previous research into different social performance methodologies. It exposes the act of shouting as rude and transgressive corporality—we shout to keep on living.

Biography

Investigación para la creación artística Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas at the Academia Superior de Artes de Bogotá ASAB. The group was founded in 2001 as a response to the interdisciplinary work of artists conducting research in the fields of audiovisual, visual, and theater arts, who are engaged in processes of creation, research and artistic pedagogy. The group currently has two research incubators: Body and Image and Untitled Collective.

• Director: Francisco Ramos
• Main researcher: Sonia Castillo
• Co-researching Professors: Leyla Castillo, Elizabeth Garavito, Oscar Monroy, Jainer León, Raúl Parra, Andrés Romero, Oscar Salamanca
• Members of the research incubators: Gustavo Mantilla, Mary Luz Galindo (students)

Aphrodisia

Aphrodisia is an intervention that demonstrates, by means of a shadow screen, the use of APHRODISIA, a female urinal designed to allow a woman to relieve herself while standing, and which doubles as a bidet and masturbation chair. In its exploration of an ethics of pleasure, this piece intends to outline, through performativity, a political and aesthetic proposal involving pleasure as a feminist category.

Biography

Julia Antivilo is a historian and a feminist artist dedicated to the creation of theoretical texts and the design and creation of art objects and performances. She currently participates in the feminist art collective Malignas Influencias, which she founded.

Martian Operetta

Martian Operetta is a remake of the Mexican film Blue Demon y las Invasoras. It revisits, through the art of transvestism, the influence that Mexican popular music and narrative film had on the Colombian imaginary. This film is projected while Crystal, Charlotte and Linda Lucía Callejas perform a live lip sync of sumptuous love songs.

Biography

One of the foremost artistic companies in Colombia, Mapa Teatro has been producing theater, performance, and art installation projects since 1984. Founders and directors Rolf and Heidi Abderhalden have created a wide-ranging repertoire of theater, opera, mixed-media performance, and site-specific installation. Their work proposes richly textured visual metaphors that explore complex psychological, social, and political relationships. Committed to experimentation, less interested in the actor as an "agent of fiction," they describe their project as "a laboratory of social imagination" that offers a space for presenting community issues and human concerns in media and performance. This combination of real-life situations and sites along with highly stylized aesthetic staging produces a tension between real action and (re)presentation. Mapa Teatro has created commissioned pieces and participated in festivals and collaborative projects worldwide.

Given Over to Want

Sculpting the body with tape, shadow-play, and boxed wine all provide material for the exploration between human want, both natural and contrived. The performance deals with the themes of transformation and desire. The precariousness of citizenship crumbles into an image as primordial as it is hungry, both fully human and fully alien.

Biography

Nao Bustamante is a performance artist born in California. Her work encompasses performance art, installation, video, pop music, and experimental rips in time. She is currently teaching New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York.

Firsthand Performances

Firsthand Performances investigates how we can incite an effective dialogue of cultural transmission across both temporal and geographical boundaries by constructing a space within Seesmic, an online site which enables threaded video conversations. This confluence of online and real-world conversation transcends the discrete boundaries of a one-time encounter.

Biographies

Nohemí Montzerrat Contreras is a Mexican choreographer, performer and dance teacher based in Brooklyn, NY. She has had the honor of working with Meredith Monk (NYC), Judith Tellez (Mx), Peter Psciscioli (NYC), Emma Lingren (Belgium) and Rip Parker (Mx). She received her MA in Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

Josephine Dorado is a New York-based media artist, performer and social entrepreneur. In her work, she explores the extension of the performance environment with technology, often utilizing movement-based, sensor-driven synthesis and networked telepresence. Currently, she teaches at the New School, where she received her M.A. in Media Studies in 2006.

Apis Lumbricadae

By projecting video-portraits, playing audio interviews, working with the body in real time, and using various other devices, this piece formulates a system that tackles and expands upon the problematic issues generated by people's racial and social realities, their effects on behavior, and their inevitable subjection to structures of power.

Biographies

Pamela Campos Mosquera is a tenth-semester student in Visual Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Nathali Buenaventura is a tenth-semester student in Visual Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Zoitsa Noriega is a visual artist at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and a student in the Interdisciplinary Masters Program in Theater and Performing Arts at the same university. She began her training and creative work in contemporary dance with Danza Común in 1997. She is a dancer, choreographer, and creative artist. Zoitsa is a part of the research work group “Prácticas entre la Tradición y la Contemporaneidad”.

Claudia Torres is a professional actress trained at the Academia Superior de Artes de Bogotá. Currently she is a student in the Interdisciplinary Masters Program in Theater and Performing Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She works with Mapa Teatro in a number of different areas and is part of the Observatorio de Performance y Política.

Natalia Zamudio is a tenth-semester student in Visual Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Seeds

Seeds entails the exhuming of a 2 year old child's full but dismantled skeleton. Parallel to this action, the skeleton is reconstructed while a forensic anthropologist continues digging up each piece. This work serves as a reflection on the intentional violence against children, practiced by the army, beginning with case 4017, en Las Majadas, Aguacatán, Huehuetenango, Guatemala, in 1982.

Biography

Regina Galindo has participated in exhibitions such as the 49th and 51st Venice Biennales; II Moscow Biennial; I Auckland Triennial; Venice-Istanbul; I Canary Islands Art and Architure Biennial; IV Valencia Biennial; III Albania Biennial, Tirana; II Prague Biennial; III Biennial of Lima, Peru; I Festival of Corporeal Art, Venezuela and IX Festival of Performance ExTeresa, México City.

To see a review of Regina's work at Exit Art reviewed in the New York Times from October 2009 click here.

Braids

In the Dominican Republic, the hair of eight Dominican women and eight Haitian women was woven together until all were joined by a single braid. The documentation of this process will be placed in the exhibition space and the audience will be invited to braid each other's hair. A reflection on the reality of one island and two countries.

Biography

Sayuri Guzmán studied fashion design at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD) and has a B.A. in Art History and Criticism. Guzmán currently organizes the International Festival of Performance and Action Art "perforMar: espacio de convergencia" in the Dominican Republic.

In a Personal Capacity

In a Personal Capacity is an experimental work that explores, through the collective efforts of its members, the field of information and communications in our contemporary world.

Biography

Teatro La Candelaria was founded in 1966 by a group of independent artists and intellectuals who came from experimental theater and the broader Colombian cultural movement. Directed by Santiago García, La Candelaria has become one of Colombia's most innovative theater companies, modernizing national drama while addressing popular audiences. Through an ongoing exploration of national folklore, situations and characters, they have created some of Colombia's most compelling plays, some of them through the method of "creación colectiva" (collective creation), addressing the acute social and political problems of their society. They also fostered the creation of the Corporación Colombiana de Teatro and have developed a number of theoretical reflections on the methods and languages of dramatic creation. To this day, La Candelaria remains committed to its repertoire and experimental approach, which the group regards as fundamental elements of artistic creation.

Full HIDVL Video

Wanderings

Displaced women walk along three different routes through high-traffic pedestrian malls. Wanderings originated in the development of certain scenes from Teatro La Máscara's theater piece Country at War with women who have been displaced due to violence in the southwestern region of Colombia.

Biography

Teatro La Máscara is the oldest --and one of the only-- feminist, all-women's theater in Colombia. Committed to feminism and social change, they have stayed true to this mission, despite the many social and economic pressures they've had to endure in an environment plagued by violence and machismo, which constantly seeks to "invisibilize" their work.La Máscara is not only creating and staging plays, but also working with marginalized communities, actively participating in political protests and demonstrations, and being involved in the organization of theater festivals.

• Director: Susana Uribe
• Members: Liliana Alzate, Lucy Bolaños, Antonio Cadavid
• Wanderings: Yolanda Paz Toloza, Ginger Lizeth Renteria Torres, Yelise Paola Peña.

Live from the Edge

Universes presents Live from the Edge, an evening that showcases the ensemble’s special brand of fusion theater in a "best of" event that tracks the evolution of their poetic language from childhood rhymes and community rituals to poetry and theater, hip-hop and gospel. Redefining what theater is and who it speaks to, >Live from the Edge is a unique performance event that turns the poem into a communal act.

Biography

Universes is a poetic theater ensemble of multi-disciplined writers and performers who fuse poetry, theater, jazz, hip-hop, politics, down home blues and Latin American boleros to create moving, challenging and entertaining theatrical works. Universes breaks the bounds of traditional theater to create their own brand of performance, inviting older and younger generations to reshape the face of American musical theater as we know it. The company consists of four core members: Steven Sapp, Mildred Ruiz, Gamal Abdel Chasten, and Ninja.

The Safe

An intervention in public space that points to the difficult relationship between the subsistence of the dispossessed and larger economic tendencies. This work raises questions about the convention of value and concepts about which objects deserve to be guarded, conserved and exhibited.

Biography

Yury Hernando Forero is a visual and fine artist born in Bogotá. He has taught at the Universidad del Valle and at the Universidad Javeriana de Cali. Much of his research revolves around the central themes of ritual and simulation, body and technology, and presence and telepresence.

The Final Rehearsal

In an old theater, which was also once a cinema hall, a group of artists craft an homage to a legendary diva whose life story parallels the history of twentieth-century Peru. Time is pressing, both literally and figuratively: on the tightrope of the present rest the specters of the past and the imminence of the future. The reality of the stage, which has the virtue of being at once physical and illusory, allows seven performers to interweave and embody the escapades of an artistic group and the imaginary travails of two key figures from the modern Peruvian tradition (writers César Vallejo and José Carlos Mariátegui) along with the apocryphal biography of a popular exotic singer (Yma Sumac). A collective creation by Yuyachkani with texts by Peter Elmore, this performance casts a ludic look back on twentieth-century Peru. It proposes a mode of theatricality grounded in a writing of signs and sensations that values and regards the relationship between actor and spectator as a form of convivencia, or coexistence. An experience that goes beyond the simple facts it narrates, it invites the audience to become a creator who can confront what the stage puts forward in accordance with his or her own sensibilities.

Performers: Augusto Casafranca, Ana Correa, Débora Correa, Amiel Cayo, Julián Vargas, Rebeca Ralli, Teresa Ralli
Stage Design: Jorge Baldeón
Technical Director: Alejandro Siles
Associate Producers: Socorro Naveda, Milagros Quintanad
Assistant Director: Valeria Tello
Concept and Direction: Miguel Rubio Zapata

Biography

Since 1971, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani has been working at the forefront of theatrical experimentation, political performance, and collective creation. "Yuyachkani" is a Quechua word that means "I am thinking, I am remembering." Under this name, the theater group has devoted itself to the collective exploration of embodied social memory, particularly in relation to questions of ethnicity, violence, and memory in Peru. Founded through the initiative of Miguel Rubio, Teresa Ralli and others, the group is recognized throughout the world as one of the most premier exponents of Latin American theater. For the past 38 years, they have created performances intimately aligned with Peruvian society, involving the spectator in an act that is at once reflective and emotional. Yuyachkani creates a theater for all that reveals Peru's great diversity, drawing on rituals, the sacred, and Andean space to provoke an introspective investigation into the past that can help us understand the present.