Performance, Residencies, Visual Art

2014 Artist in Residence – Dey Hernández-Vázquez

Posted on by Alejandro

The Loisaida Center is proud to announce our current

2014 Visual Arts-Performance Residency Recipient:

Dey Hernández-Vázquez

Hernández will present the installation/performance piece:

Casita: for Julia de Burgos

About the piece:
 

In the danger of having the memory of Julia reduced to “the stereotype of the bohemian poet who lived a tragically short life…”The artist will use Julia’s poetic images to create a space that lifts off from the page allowing the spectator/participant to drift into the actual space where the artistic experience is taking place, la “Casita”. The architectural installation will mark out personal territory in the public realm.

 

About Dey:
 

Deymirie “Dey” Hernández-Vázquez is an Architect, Teaching Artist, and Puppeteer who works in a variety of media. She is a passionate advocate for the arts as an active educational tool. Issues of race, identity, language, and community are fundamental to her work as a cultural educator and artist. For the past 6+ years, she has designed and facilitated art workshops with AgitArte, a non-profit organization dedicated to initiate and support artistic and popular education projects in disadvantaged and marginalized communities to further the struggle for social justice. Dey is also an artist and puppeteer of the radical workers’ heater collective, Papel Machete. Their performances in community, theaters, streets and protests employ puppets, masks, objects and music to denounce exploitation, build solidarity, and agitate to action in the struggles of the working class. All of their cultural work is generated collectively through facilitated creative processes and construction workshops using papier mâché as their medium and exploring a wide range of forms and styles that include toy theater, cantastoria, shadow theater, table-top puppetry, humanettes, cut-outs, masks, and giants. Dey’s arts and architectural background are key to the design and construction of giant puppets, puppetry booths, shadow shows and toy theaters. Dey Hernández-Vázquez received a MA from the School of Architecture, University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2010. She currently lives and works in Boston.

 

Dance/Movement, Residencies, Theater

2014 Artist in Residence : Jeca Rodríguez Colón

Posted on by Alejandro

The Loisaida Center is proud to announce our current

2014 Dance-Theater Residency Recipient:

Jeca Rodríguez Colón

Rodriguez is currently in the development stages of a piece with the working title:

(M)others.

About the piece:
 

The piece has four female characters, all women, 2 of which are ghosts or memories from the family of the main character, one character who is the mother of the main character and the main character. Through their movements and their occasional dialog the audience will be able to witness how the invasion of the United States of America influenced and affected each of this mothers. Some were affected directly by the lack of education, others by the alcoholism and abuse of her veteran husband and the others by the unspoken past of their mothers.

 
About Jeca: 

Jessica “Jeca” Rodríguez-Colón  is a Puerto Rican performer with over 12 years of experience as a dancer and choreographer. She began her contemporary dance training with Petra Bravo and Viveca Vázquez. She holds a B.A. from Hunter College with a double major in Dance and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She was the recipient of Hunter College’s 2005 Choreography Departmental Award. Jeca is an MFA candidate at Transart Institute with Plymouth University. After participating in the EMERGENYC 2013 program at the Hemispheric Institute she began to explore performance arts and public interventions. Her work is connected to different aspects of the maternal kinesthetic language in space and the politics that surrounds it. She is currently part of inaugural cohort of The EmergeLab@BAX, a laboratory initiative with the support of the Hemispheric Institute and Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Her latest work includes a street intervention in collaboration with Mette Loulou von Kohl “Manifest Collective Movement”, a future installation “Sneak into My Maternal Chaos” and future performance “Desde Adentro” to be presented August 2014 in Berlin, Germany.