Performances

PUNC [ARK]AEOLOGY excavates a series of artifacts [objects and texts] from ancient history and early ethnography and queers them in stylized lecture. Video, photographs + artifact displays merge with vocal modulation, synthesizer and synthetic smoke to create a hybrid laboratory for the ritual dissection of dominant histories and archaeologies.

A Drop of Honey depicts a scene of water-based torture. The artist replaces water with honey, a substance with medicinal properties. The performance will be live streamed via Skype. The “torture chamber” will be unknown by the public and will thus become a non-place. This piece evokes metaphors of power, martyrdom and survival.

SILVER & GOLD is a “filmformance” inspired by queer filmmaker Jack Smith. Bustamante channels his muse, 1940s Dominican movie star Maria Montez, in a bizarre exploration of race, glamour and the silver screen. This work is dedicated to and originated from an invitation by José E. Muñoz to participate in “Live Film! Jack Smith!” in Berlin.

Les Demimondes examines how fine arts, music, film, photography and the media have profited off the shabby mystique of the whore while whores themselves are criminalized for doing the work itself.The show encourages artists and academics to consider their role in producing work about the sex trade that is more realistic and less of a “saviour.”

Peggy Shaw had a stroke in January 2011. The stroke was in her PONS, which rhymes with the Fonz, one of her many role models. Since the stroke she’s realized she has never really performed solo. She has always had a host of lounge singers, movie stars, rock and roll bands and eccentric family members living inside her.

An electroacoustic music concert presenting 50 years of creation by composers from the Americas, intersected by words and media arts references. Music has always been a powerful vehicle for spreading ideas, raising awareness and making us reflect. Music is a way of perceiving and understanding the world. The arts have a role in defining the future.

Like sound and light, voice has a non-material and sculptural dimension. Its presence in space and time combines volume and propagation. In this performance installation, people standing still packed in black garbage bags, inside barrels, speaking their names non-stop, their birth dates and future death dates, proclaiming their own death.

Lifting Stone, a queer, erotic re/mix of sections from Gertrude Stein’s classic text Lifting Belly, creates space for intimate encounters. This poetic performance reflects on vulnerability, violence, our relationship to the land, and being “stone.” Working with a queer femme notion of ‘stone,’ Crowe plays with ideas of touching and being touched.

This is the story of Belle, the Red Mother, who travels across what was once the people’s land with her horse and companion, Blue Fred. Weaving contemporary stories with traditional Kuna demon stories, it explores the many facets of legacy and memory through the eyes of a cunning old Native woman who is living through the wars on Indigenous people.

FLUOXETINA is a sensory-scenic reflection on the indiscriminate prescription and use of antidepressants. Popularly known as a "happy pill," fluoxetine has become one of the most sold drugs worldwide. This is an attack on fluoxetine, which neutralizes our personalities and standardizes us as consumers of the pharmaceutical industry.

Adapted from Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel, Pedro Páramo follows a son who returns home to meet his father and reveals how one man’s unchecked appetite destroys everything he loves and the town that made him great. Pedro Páramo was created by Buendía with Chicago artists in Chicago and Havana, Cuba, with half from Cuba and half from Chicago. It is a collaboration with The Goodman Theatre, Museum of Contemporary Art, and Northwestern University.

This is the story of two twin boys with identical thoughts and feelings. When the war arrives, their mother abandons them in their grandmother’s care. Far from love and certainty, they begin a process of self-education that will allow them to survive hunger, pride, humiliation, corruption, abuse, death, and ultimately… solitude.

This responsive movement/media solo examines the manifestation, representation, and magnification of embodied trauma and memory. A dancer lies restrained on her back, surveilled by a mass of equipment. Her action or inaction, as well as the quality of each act impacts what is concealed and revealed, inviting and interrupting the audience’s gaze.

Disarmed: An Artist Is Made Manifest is a performance that moves through the nooks and crannies of 23 years of artistic labor, taking a stance on art and the country that survives itself. Far from a heroic act, it wanders bravely through the political-cultural space of Puerto Rico, an island that turns its back on itself as it fervently unravels.

We are hybrid scholar/performance artists tracing the history of feminist/artist culture through the contours of its recorded language. The performance Scenes From the Archives will allow us to engage in critical discussion about the use of performative measures to unlock the past, challenging representations of work with a political intent.

Movement is about engaging in the here-and-now. For choreographer and interpreter Zab Maboungou, her choreographic vocabulary and personal poetics emerge from those profound musical forms that, through and beyond the instrument, are sustained by our steps and resonate in our gestures. Her dance is a dance for thought.