Additional Performances

A small number of spectators (20 maximum) are blindfolded and led to a secret location to witness a peculiar interrogation. Phobophilia poses the question: What is the role of the poet in an age characterized by fear? The performance is inspired by the life and art of Jean Cocteau.

With this lip-synch performance, 2boys.tv splice together iconic American popular cultural motifs with images generated by the western world’s first great propoganda machine: The Vatican. Show Business “celebrates” and “commemorates” the rise of Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger after the passing of Pope John Paul II in 2005.

Within the folds of the zona pellucida, rapt in a somnambulous state, the “accused” begins to believe she is capable of the crimes with which she has been charged, and that perhaps, somehow, she has indeed carried out the horrific transgressions.

This site-specific project took place at the Santamaría bullring in downtown Bogotá. A bull was drawn on the sand, and then set on fire after nightfall; the silhouette was then erased, but as more attempts were made to erase it, the more visible it became.

A performance about race and identity in the Americas, Anna Deavere Smith experiments with a translated performance, moving between English and Spanish to convey a series of portraits of representing identities in crisis.

Original trapeze piece in which the artist combines movement on trapeze with the telling of her story of surviving sexual abuse and the subsequent development of a transgendered identity.

The Anti-Empire, Anti-War Cabaret, part of the Hemispheric Institute's 2003 Spectacles of Religiosities Encuentro was envisioned as a unified hemispheric scream, bringing together activists, artists and academics against the Bush Administration's war plans and empire building.

Arthur Aviles was born in Queens and grew up in Long Island and the Bronx. received a B/A in Theatre/Dance from BARD college. He was a member of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company from '87 to '95 and received a New York Dance and performance award (Bessie) in 1989.

The 8th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute sought to examine the broad intersections between urban space, performance and political/artistic action in the Americas.

O documentário cênico Luis Antonio – Gabriela tem início no ano de 1953, com o nascimento de Luis Antonio, que passou infância, adolescência e parte da juventude em Santos até ir embora para Espanha.

A darling of the Montréal cult cabaret scene, Gigi L’Amour descends upon Trasnocheo to pump up the party with this recounting of the infamous 'Lollipop Experiment'.

Potestad ame out of the post-graduate research work of two professors (an actor and a director) around the exploration of psychic states and the question of political identities during the time of Argentina’s dictatorship. We seek to provoke memories in a country that has few memories.

In Comadre Araña, the traditional music of Colombia's Pacific region meets jazz, rock, pop and electronic music. Three female voices intermingle with the rhythm of the bombo, marimba, cununo and guasá, along with electronic instruments, the Indian sitar, the tiple guitar of the Colombian Andes, loops, samplers and all the resources of live electronic music.

Dan Fishback will sing songs from his past decade in the NYC antifolk and queer performance art scenes, including songs from his musical “The Material World” which Time Out NY called “the best downtown musical in years.”

Lozano’s work investigates how the body is constructed and conceptualized within institutions of state control.The alternate title for this performance, '12 Physical-Rhythmical Exercises of the Americas, without Weapons,' proposes compelling questions about the construction of the physical and the political body, always fluctuating between the individualistic and the social, and resisting or assimilating institutional conventions.

David Pleasant: President and Founder of RiddimAthon!, Inc., David Pleasant is a musical stylist who was raised in the Gullah/Geechee culture of Georgia, namely Sapelo Island, Darien/McIntosh County and Savannah. His work is driven by the wealth of African retention in the mentioned region, as well as the synthesis of that material into a peculiar resource for American culture.

Dozens of male and female executives, dressed in business attire, carrying suitcases, bags, cell phones and documents, covered in mud, blindfolded, walk very slowly, blending in with passers-by, destabilizing the daily flow of the city’s financial and political center. The performance is by Desvio Coletivo and Coletivo Pi, based in São Paulo. Blind seeks to politically intervene in the city and provoke different readings.

In 'Zona de dolor' (Zone of Pain), Eltit places the body – her body – at the center of this political and social re-signification: she cuts and burns herself and then goes to a brothel, where she reads part of her novel 'Lumpérica.' Her mortified body mirrors the wounded national body, and establishes a connection between the individual and the collective, and the private and the public, exposing her physicality, her words, and her voice in communion with a space that exists at the edge of social structures.

This is a video documentation of a performance by EDEMA incollaboration with Carlos Ezequiel Monteros (H.I.J.O.S.) and Pilar Medina (group Contraseña, Monterrey), presented at the second Hemispheric Institute Encuentro in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2001.

‘El gran teatro del mundo’ is an ‘auto sacramental’ written by Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca in the 17th century to allegorically convey catholic values. In dialogue with the Shakespearian notion that 'all the world is a stage,' the play states that human beings have to play a role and make decisions with virtue and wisdom, because rewards or punishment will come in the after life.

Eleonora Fabião's "Giro Piece" is a dance performance, an installation, a scream claiming attention to the body immersed in present times. An awakening call to the body led by, and oppressed by, globalization. Fabião explains, "The experience of being a "world citizen" in the era of globalization produces on me, among many advantages and benefits, a disturbing vertigo, a certain existential dizziness.

Ways to Play considers the aesthetic and disciplinary objectification of the human body by exploring the street as a field for an old popular game in Brazil, the Cinco Marias. In contemporary society, we succumb to the seduction of borrowed attitudes, in a kind of non-authenticity, in fragments of attitudes chosen, almost unconsciously, from a range of dominant stereotypes.

Frantz is a lyricist and poet with extensive experience in arts education and workshop and program development. He served as head counselor for Project 2050's Summer Retreats. He has been working with youth for over ten years and practicing his art as an MC and poet with The Peace Poets. Frantz studies writing at The New School University in New York City.

'Cosmic Blood' explores the concept of mestizaje, a Spanish word used to describe the race mixture of Spanish and indigenous blood as a result of colonialism, from a perspective informed by history, contemporary culture and racial formation and creative, spiritual speculation about the future.

An avant-garde meditation on coercion and consent inspired by Gédé – the Haitian Vodou spirit of life and death - that weaves moments in Haiti’s geopolitical history with responses to my retelling of that history.

Since 2003, Campuzano has been working on the 'Transvestite Museum' project, an exploration of the realities of transvestism, a staging of its aesthetics, and a confrontation between its forms of knowledge and official discourses. This performance explored a transvestite body that performs in order to persist in the face of a denied discourse: ritual turned into spectacle, a queer body whose performance deconstructs and assembles its topics and differences as strategy.

This work puts word and writing in relationship to each other as a violent act, by a man who never learned to read and write. The story tells of his desire to understand the spoken word. The son writes in the voice of his father and the father does the same, but on the body of the son, simultaneously: “The body, the father, and the son, like the stigma of not knowing”.

Grupo de Teatro de Bonecos Giramundo: The artist members of this group – who have been performing through its existence awarded shows such as Cobra Norato – are able to provide their puppets with the ability to interpret complex texts. "Each puppet has a different type of information". The process of creating a play demands hard work on researching.

Galpão was founded in 1982 and is the most important drama group from Minas Gerais and one of the best-considered groups in Brazil and abroad. Some of its performances, such as Romeu e Julieta (staged in "The Globe", in London and in several countries) have made the group internationally known.

Letters from the Dead began as a collectively-created image event commemorating the murder of thousands of youth killed in inner city violence in Toronto's Caribbean diaspora. The event comprises a silent funeral procession in the street. Bringing together the messages from the dead and media reports on violence, and the losses of living, the performance traces one woman’s attempt to bury her grandson and convey his demands for justice in the present.

Video documentation of Jim Calder and Sigfrido Aguilars performance The Alamo Piece presented as part of the 2nd Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, celebrated in June of 2001 in Monterrey, Mexico under the title Memory, Atrocity and Resistance.

Border Sound Files is an hour long solo performance-lecture that mixes spoken narrative, spoken, history, and spoken critique, with a collage of sound, noise, and music. The piece focuses on the border between Southern California and Northern Mexico and explores it as a transnational field of sound, "an aural border."

Homage is an act of gender queer corporeal agency. It is an offering of vulnerability. Homage opens wounds that have healed on my body to reactivate the psychic energy stored there and to invite the audience to eradicate the boundaries between us.

Live performance in which economic data from our everyday lives and ongoing global crisis are converted into absurd neoDadaist music. Economusic is a darkly playful and highly audience-participatory event that takes note of, and makes notes from, falling wages, rising sea levels, and other indicators of our suffering and success.

Larry Yazzie: (Meskwaki/Dine) is a World Champion Fancy Dancer who consistently takes top honors at American Indian powwows in the United States and Canada. In 1995, he won the World Championship for the Northern Style Fancy Dance.

Luisa Calcumil has worked in theatre since 1975. She started as an actress, presenting twenty theatre performances and acting in five films of international importance and in various television programmes.

The play is based on a particular type of dream, the pewma, which has the power of transmitting messages to its dreamer. The memory of the Mapuche people, heavy with the traumatic experience of genocide, is performed in the present through this dream.

The Spoken World is a full evening of performance with United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and 2011 Alpert Award winner Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Through choreopoem, Joseph articulates the story of achieving manhood in the United States through the lens of hip hop, global travel, and urban environmental health.

Performative dialogue between fragments of testimony made by migrant women in Santiago and the body of the performer in order to create a “corporamic” view of immigration in Santiago.

Original solo work by Michelle Matlock, made up of a series of monologues which explores the influence that the icon, stereotype and myth of “Mammy” has had on contemporary American culture.

We want to laugh at a problem that afflicts the population: the feeling of being a victim, of not being able to deal with circumstances or with a secret nature that forces us to complain.

Nadia Granados performs live re-creations of audiovisual materials, playing with obscene language, sexual material, and emancipatory content.

Huitlacoche is a swollen black fungus that grows on ears of corn. A culinary delicacy in Mexico, it is considered a pest in the United States. This will be a multi-media performance about revolutionary acts, faith and survival, food sovereignty and dangerous border crossings.

This choreography project arises from the need to question the ways dance is learned: imitation, copy, innovation, reproduction, creation.

Mestizo Orpheus tells of the return of a politician to his past and his connection to military dictatorship. A phone call about the disinterment of the body of his companion, Eurydice, puts Orpheus in contact with a past that he has tried for years to forget.

This is a video documentation of Pamela Sneed’s reading/spoken word ‘America Ain’t Ready,’ presented in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Sneed delivers scathing and raucously humorous commentary on some of the key issues of our time, taking her audience on a journey through popular culture, American politics, and the New York City underground scene of the '80s and '90s that insists on naming the unnamed and telling the untold.

Arctic's (from Alaska and Greenland) performance group Pamyua reinterprets modern traditions of the Inuit and Yup'ik Eskimo through storytelling, music and dance. Pamyua performs Yup'ik danced stories that portray the traditions of the Yup'ik culture in Southwestern Alaska.

This action will include 300 women, the majority of whom are victims and survivors of violence. Together with theatre and dance artists, they will create a living, active and poetic presence, staging an aesthetics of resistance. This event will help make visible to Colombia and to the world the disappearances and forced displacements, the systematic assassinations of political leaders in the country, and the youth who are presented as "false positives."

Quetzal Guerrero carries the name "precious feather" in the Aztec-Nahuatl language. As a Suzuki trained violinist, he has studied and performed internationally since the age of 5, playing with legends such as Tito Puente, Lalo Guerrero and Jorge Santana. He is an accomplished visual artist and actor who trains with Axe Capoeira.

This is a video documentation of the writing of the poem 'La Vida Nueva' in New York City's sky. For this 'performance-acción' or ‘poesía-acción’ (‘poetry-action’), five planes drew white smoke letters silhouetted over the blue sky. The poem was written in Spanish as form of recognition for all the minority groups all over the world. The photographs of this ‘poesía-acción’ are included in the book ‘Anteparaíso’ (‘Anteparadise,’ a bilingual edition, University of California Press, 1986).

Reverend Billy Preaches Reverend Billy speaks to people about shopping, sin and salvation.

A concert in four movements performed by a woman who uses a musical instrument called pussyphone (pepáfono)which is played with the vagina. This performance offers a reflection on cultural rights for all audiences.

My proposal aims to demystify the horror of old age in an ironical way, inventing my own deranged aesthetic and moral solutions for the "problem of age." I hope my mockery of this absurd contemporary reality exposes a broken society based on looks and how old age became synonymous with insult.

The immigrant is a divided being. A being marked by having crossed to the other side, always conscious of “here” and “there,” “before” and “after.” After the moment of crossing, the immigrant is never the same.

This performance is based on the destructive actions that verge on self-agression to allude to the political violence and the flagellation of the Chilean social body under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.

Susana Baca: Live in Concert-2003

With Juan Mediano Cotito, Hugo Bravo Sanchez, David Pinto Pinedo, Serio Valdeos Bensa, and Fernando Hoyle de los Rios

Biography

Susana Baca is the foremost singer of Afro-Peruvian music. Her music, on Luaka Bop lable, has promoted an awareness of the many cultural contributions of African-Peruvians. Also to this aim, she and her husband Ricardo Pereira are the founders and co-directors of the Instituto Negrocontinuo in Lima.

Susana Baca, the Peruvian vocalist who became internationally renowned with "Maria Lando," a track in the 1995 David-Byrne-produced CD The Soul of Black Peru, has often been compared to Cesaria Evora, from Cabo Verde. It's not surprising; both women have found rich material in folk traditions of their countries, and both sing songs that are rooted in gloomy emotions: pain, nostalgia, longing.

During the Encuentro Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Tania Bruguera presented 'Two Simultaneous Performances.' Although their projects emerged from different geographical contexts and different performance languages, Bruguera and Gómez-Peña engaged in a 'performatic conversation' whose goal was to 'coexist and co-create a parallel, temporary universe' as 'an act of international reconciliation.'

Cuentos Eróticos Africanos is based on The Black Decameron, a compilation of African folk stories by anthropologist Leo Frobenius. This is a shortened piece of the original production of Teatro Esquina Latina, with two actresses instead of the original four. The play is a spectacle of storytelling that creates the scene, for young people and adults, of the daily life, humor, and the game of love in the land that is Africa.

Video documentation of Tito Vasconcelos' solo performance presented during the 2nd Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, celebrated in June of 2001 in Monterrey, Mexico under the title 'Memory, Atrocity and Resistance'. A parody of Mexican politics and a queering of the Mexican political landscape, in this performance, Vasconcelos is in 'drag' as Martita, President Vicente Fox's then partner, on her way to become First Lady of Mexico.

The Hemispheric Institute's 9th Encuentro, held at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, sought to explore the multiple valences of the term MANIFEST! How are performances mobilized and syncretized in civic, community, and cultural contexts to create manifold forms of political expression? How do public, theatrical events produce ‘evidence’ that manifests ideas otherwise invisible, hidden, or unspeakable?

The chants and dances that are used in this performance praise and honor native Hawaiians' gods and chiefs. They celebrate their beloved lands, and call for unity and solidarity.

This is a reflection on genetically-modified corn and its disastrous consequences for life—for the original natural species as well as for the communities that have cultivated corn since ancient times, developing entire cultures around it.

Requiem is a performative intervention, by way of ritual, to remember the murders committed during the “war on drugs” initiative implemented by Mexico’s central government. Requiem is an attempt, from the realm of performance art, to open with a coroner’s knife the discourse of death put forth by those in power under the guise of “national security.”

At the opening ceremony of the Encuentro in Belo Horizonte, led by the the Maxacalí (photo above) and the Kaiapó/Mebengokré from Brazil, representatives from indigenous groups from throughout the Americas exchanged dances, songs and words to welcome all the participants to the 10-day event.