Performances

Refrain creates a cyclical choreography through the repeated writing of a phrase. These danced refrains produce visual documents that trade legibility for physical accumulation, expanding the original phrases through imperfect repetition. The refrains performed at the Encuentro are noncontiguous excerpts from John Cage's 1951 Lecture on Something, selected after hearing the story of Julius Eastman.

This piece is a critique of institutional fraud and bureaucracy. The body is suspended over a tower of human rights that are violated daily by thousands of citizens, especially those with political and social power.

Witness is a 20-minute performance for one audience member at a time that configures the viewer as accomplice to an event, “manifesting” accountable witnesses out of impartial observers. Together we are challenged to acknowledge our participation in acts of violence, and to confront our responsibility for the other. Then, we are charged to act.

Beatriz tests her friendship with Lyon by culling incriminating details from his average life through confession, surveillance, and interrogation. Will this verify the new maxim of the modern security age, that everyone is guilty of something?

Ana Correa engages in a dialogue with the audience and shares her process of character creation during the era of political violence in Peru. Ana connects us to an actress that engages theater as a way of life, where presence and character inhabit a fine border line between fiction and reality.

A body narrative on the latest street protests in Rio de Janeiro for the “Passe Livre” (Free Fare). After the big marches in my city, my body was engraved with images that are impossible to translate into words. This performance is a catharsis of that experience. It is an open space to share the rage of this public body, made manifest.

Lundberg/Torres-Sánchez is a three-part re-imagining of Benjamin Lundberg’s political identity. Standing in opposition to culturally perceived paradoxes, the performance refigures the religious, governmental, personal and social rituals that use the artist’s body as a filter for communally defined expectations and vocabularies.

A Kyogen, or comic interlude in the Japanese Noh cycle, originally created in 1971 in response to President Nixon's pardon of Lt. Calley, the only US soldier convicted for the My Lai Massacre. This reconstruction effort will also quote president Obama's looking-forward-as-opposed-to-looking-backward philosophy, regarding torture and war crimes.

Gourmet anthropophagy with clear references to Xipe Tótec, an Aztec deity who removed his skin to feed humankind and save it from starvation. Audience members—guests at this “performansupper”—will flay artivist Orgy Punk, who will be dressed and wrapped in delicious Gran Reserva serrano ham.

This commemorative ritual marks the 40th year after the Chilean coup d’état, in which several women disappeared. The performance is a gesture of solidarity to pay tribute to María Teresa Bustillos and all the women who believed in their ideals. Never forget. This action seeks to reconstitute a collective memory around these disappearances.

The Cuddle Commandos project focuses on the transformative relationship between humour and social activism, incorporating satire, subversion, and parody as a means to address broader cultural concerns. The Commandos challenge traditional militaristic codes that connote power, hyper-masculinity, nationalistic honour, and absolute authority.

I kneel on a Chinese traditional artwork, shooting myself with ink. This performance is an apology for my twelve-year absence from the culture that has nurtured me. I baptize myself with Chinese ink in order to be saved from fear of loss, to preserve my identity in a process of self-transformation, and to capture my stray soul in a foreign land.

The goal of this performance is to reposition themes, with memory as a starting point, in the context of the economic crisis of the 30s. This has created a story in time marked by the dispossession and appropriation carried out by large mutinational corporations such as Duncan Fox, Grace & Co., Weir Minerals and Barrick Gold.

Cantata for Missing Women is an excerpt from the play Attawapiskat is no Exception in which members of a northern community are evacuated and moved into a large city. As they arrive they hear the voices of the missing and murdered aboriginal women, hovering over the city streets, demanding some space in the minds of the audience.

Veil is a series of private actions between the artist and a viewer inside a sanctuary of white linen. Each interaction is unique and spontaneous. I seek to blur the line between religion and art by appropriating rites from my heritage. I do not reenact sacred rituals, rather, I borrow their gestures and reinvent them as my own.

Inspired by José Lezama Lima’s poem by the same name, this performance is presented as a painful ritual of weariness and outrage. Having become an ignorant pack animal, the human being accumulates the detritus of a past that offers no hope.

[saffron_test.] is a performance that takes place within the speculative space of an ethno-dysphoric laboratory. The scientist tests the properties of saffron, [aphrodisiac/ anti-depressant] by ingesting a saffron potion as she sings in perz-ish, resulting in a DIY escapist medicine that longs to diffuse terrorism[s] through acts of desire.

A terrorist attack against homo/hetero hegemonic constructions of beauty. Through horror and asphyxiation I create a hybrid persona that speaks about normative beauty across cultural borders towards a Nicaraguan native worldview.

If you had the opportunity to give your future great great great great grandchildren/nieces/nephews a treasure, what would it be? The Whisper Garden is part magical performance installation and part site specific immersive theatre that lets us find and discover our treasures.

Through Nunounenon the collaborators seek to open new space for dialogue and promote alternative approaches to gender and power dynamics in contemporary dance. Turning clichés inside out, Nunounenon reveals the absurdity of hyper-sexualized bodies and discrepancies between idealism and reality while affirming the right for every body to hold power.

This project seeks to re-inscribe and re-activate the power of the four little Os in the word voodoo. That's how they spell it. The performance entails cross-stitching numerous historical references of this word, in red and in various sizes, on a dress that once belonged to my mother and late grandmother.

Human Resources for Humans appropriates an HR framework (a tool for the administration of human capital) to generate discussion around labour, exploitation, class, and unemployment. In the context of the Encuentro, HR4H will identify and respond to the power dynamics present among the participants, organizers, and outsiders of the event.

Making our own path with our own inner light is the only way to get joyful results. In order to represent this state of being, she performs the image titled “Cuánto encontró para vencer” by Cuban artist Marta María Pérez Bravo. This performance is a magical coexistence of religious and artistic universes.

Handheld Devices- Phoning is the latest in a series of works by Inner Fish in which performers use only human or battery-powered hand-held machines. Phoning sources the smartphone to invert the common dynamics of distance created in a screen-mediated culture. Performances are five-minute moments in a portable closet with a random passerby.

Juana La Larga, a hermaphrodite whose case was described by Dr. Narciso Esparragosa in Guatemala in 1803, inspired this research-performance about the body and the forms of eroticism that do not conform to patriarchal society. Violence toward the female body continues to be a brutal reality in the first, third, and last world.

Tortilla Oracle is a participatory performance based on ancient Mayan and Aztec shamanic forms of divination brought into contemporary form. The performance involves ritual, sacred space, intuition, and a transaction of give and take between the artist and the participants. I read people’s tortillas like one might read tarot cards or tea leaves.

State terrorism did away with thirty thousand. We spent years looking for them. Their bones arise as silent witnesses to truncated lives; they return to identify their murderers. In this virtual burial, we seek to ponder the end of a cycle that starts with forced disappearances and now ends forty years later with punishment for their perpetrators.

Lara Kramer’s new creation NGS (“Native Girl Syndrome”) dives into street culture, as enacted in a raw theatrical performance by Karina Iraola and Angie Cheng. Their drug filled, disassociated personas take the audience on a dynamic journey of addiction, loss, and alienation.

An Orisha is a spiritual being interpreted as a manifestation of Olofi. Yemaya is the maternal force of life and creation. But can we find her attributes in a man? This choreography challenges the aspects of maleness that permeate Hispano Canadian culture through contemporary movement, ballet, Cuban folkloric dance, music, religion, and daily rituals.

Ache What Make combines urgent poetry, ritual theatre and layered song to reflect on disaster, dignity and death-defying love. Whether she's talking about post-earthquake Haiti, conjuring Jean-Michel Basquiat, or recounting her run-in with a skinhead on a crowded city train, Moïse testifies to stubborn compassion and a playful will to live.

The performance investigates the link between the blank spaces of the performer’s personal memory and the political amnesia in Chile. The work is situated in the blurry zones of a forgetting that is passed down from generation to generation: that which cannot be said, which cannot be recovered, which has never been said.

The piece CORPS.RELATIONS is a duet between my body and my head. The work explores the gap between the logical representation of reality and the immediate embodiment of impulses, creating an absurd illusion for unity.

Homage to the artists, The Darkness portrays the eviction of a group of them from an industrial building in downtown Montreal. In this piece, whose action could take place in any big city anywhere in the world, friends separate, spirits wander aimlessly in deserted places and messages are hidden behind walls for the archaeologists of the future.

What makes someone break their inertia and take collective action? What can destabilize a body and generate a desire for movement? How is affect able to open up the body to the world, provoking a movement of contagion and contamination between bodies, so as to create a social choreography?