The Loisaida Festival’s 4th Annual Theater Lab

Co-produced by MEZCOLANZA NYC & Loisaida Inc.

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Brief description of participants and their performance, visual, theatrical or musical pieces:

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1. Teresa Hernández / Performance / 15 min

Title: (A) parecer  

About the piece: Performance-space intervention and body. Appearance is a human condition that reveals the uniqueness of each in the encounter with the-othrx. Ten years ago he works with a woman dressed in a black suit. She has named her-the walker. She goes out and walks in and out, complains, reveals in she a-seem what she lives.

About the artist: Stage performer. Actress, dancer, creator-interpreter, author and director of her own texts, self-management activist. She has spent more than twenty-five years research and practice from the frontiers of dance, theater and performance. Looking for other ways of doing, narrating and being on stage, starting with the integral study of the body, space, and its own text. Their themes surround; Identities as shifting and complex lands; Art and it´s established canons, violence and power with its multiple faces and bifurcations. Precariousness is a fundamental part of its ethics. Hernández’s career has been recognized by the United States Artists Foundation under the discipline of Theater Arts. (USA Role Fellow-2011). She is the second Puerto Rican on the island to receive such distinction, being the only one in the field of theater. She holds a master’s degree in “Management and Cultural Management” from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras precinct.

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2. Kairiana Núñez / Performance / 10 min

Title: La basquetbolista

About the piece: Set in a basketball game’s tight quarter, a Puerto Rican basketball player has to row hard against the opposite team’s defense in the presence of a referee that unfairly penalizes her and does not call the true fault.

About the artist: Actress taurine and Puerto Rican. Graduated from the Drama Department of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, (2009). He began his career in 1996 with Pedro Santaliz, and later became a founding member of the theater group in the streets Jóvenes del 98 under the direction of Maritza Pérez Otero. Later he continued his training with Puerto Rican teachers and artists Rosa Luisa Márquez, Teresa Hernández, Viveca Vázquez, among others. In Argentina, she trained at Sportivo Teatral with Mirta Bogdasarian and Ricardo Bartís (2011-2013, Buenos Aires), and was part of the Quinto Piso Theater Companies, directed by Daniel Godoy, and El Rizoma Collective (2011-2016, Buenos Aires) . In 2017 he returns to Puerto Rico, where despite the imbalance, she bets on continuing to grow artistically, professionally, Ideologically and humanely.

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3. Mickey Negrón / Performance / 18 min

Title: Transgressed Body

About the piece: An emigrant, homosexual, transvesti. Strength in the voices of the minority.

About the artist: Mickey Negrón Puerto Rican artist. Artistic director of the Asuntos Efímeros art platform. Enthusiastic writer. Free thinker. Nonconforming gender. Cultural manager. Singer. Moving. Student who never finishes. Fan of pop singers and frustrated athlete. It just premiered as a critic. Currently works an artistic residence at the Center of Fine Arts to be presented in August 2017 and coordinates the second edition of Quiebre: International Performance Festival in Puerto Rico.

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4. Yan Christian Collazo / Performance / 15 min

Title: Untitled 

About the piece: Character that intervenes in the intermediates, comments the pieces, is ally of the public. Uses a half mask makes jokes about the current situation on the island in relation to the floating islands that we are all talking about individualism, migration and the condition of the migrant.

About the artist: Yan Christian Collazo: Actor, poet, creator, dancer. Puerto Rican. He holds a Bachelors degree in Drama with a second concentration in Foreign Languages ​​specialized in Italian. Studied at “Universitá Cattólica del Sacro Cuore” in Milan, Italy; Specialized in poetry and Italian literature. He took workshops with Latin American theater groups including Malayerba from Ecuador and Yuyachkani from Peru. De Clown with maestro Luis Oliva of Puerto Rico, David Martínez Sánchez of Spain and with the group “Pig Iron Theater Company” of Philadelphia. In 2012, he was part of the group La Pata de Cabra, acting in the play ‘Cortadito or Capuchino’, directed by his teacher Rosa Luisa Márquez. The Festival of Theater of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture was invited. He obtained an MFA in Ensemble Based Theater. He was selected to participate in the “Mad River Festival” along with the company of the school “Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theater. He has been invited to the “2017 River Theater Festival” in Blue Lake, CA and to “California Summer School for the Arts” in Los Angeles, CA. After completing his short tour with his thesis, he will move to New York with a view to forming a multidisciplinary theater group and establishing a working and collaboration bridge between Puerto Rico, New York, California and the world.

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5. Awilda Rodríguez Lora / Theater Lab MC / Contemporary Dance / 19 min 

Title: Untitled

About the piece: Contemporary dance movement piece that accounts for its status as a migrant who absorbed American culture and made it theirs.

About the artist: Awilda Rodríguez-Lora is a performance choreographer and cultural entrepreneur. Born in Mexico, raised in Puerto Rico, and working in-between North and South America and the Caribbean, Rodríguez Lora’s performances traverse multiple geographic histories and realities. In this way, her work promotes progressive dialogues regarding hemispheric colonial legacies, and the unstable categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Rodríguez Lora is currently a host/coordinator at La Rosario in Santurce (Puerto Rico) where she is creating, researching, and producing her life project, La Mujer Maravilla, while developing new strategies for the sustainability of live arts in Puerto Rico. After more than ten years of work as a fully independent artist, she is committed to further studying how artistic economies can be harnessed to support alternative forms of life rooted in communality, creativity, and social justice. laperformera.org.

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6. Jeanne D Arc / Dance / Flamenco / 15 min

Title: Untitled

About the piece: Contemporary dance & Flamenco intertwined with poems of protest by Federico García Lorca

About the artist: Jeanne D Arc Casas (1984) was born in Aibonito, Puerto Rico. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Individualized Studies from the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. In 2011 she earned a master’s degree in performance and choreography at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque where she was a Moderna and Flamenco dance instructor. Since January 2012 is part of the company Soledad Barrio y Noche Flamenca. She has made a large number of tours in the United States, Canada and Argentina Europe and the East. It also teaches lessons in modern dance, contemporary dance and body movement in different schools and universities. Recently Jeanne D ‘Arc Houses participated in the program of residential artifacts of the Fine Arts Center Luis A. Ferré de Santurce, PR where shows the show Hij @ s de la Bernarda directed by the teacher Rosa Luisa Márquez.

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7. Poncili Creación Artist Collective/ Performance / Art Installation  

About their piece: During the month of May Poncili Creación will be studying the Loisaida community and its mural history in order to produce a performance piece that speaks about the short comings that the community has faced in the past and still face today.

Inspired by Loisaida, Poncili Creación will create several of their unique sculptures based on Loisaida’s murals and community. Using different elements they will create a performance to be presented at the Theater Lab.

About the artists: Poncili Creación conceptualizes and designs interactive experiences for all ages. The company has been conspiring for over half a decade, in which they have shared their work with several countries throughout their international tours to the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean. Their creation technique consists of several disciplines which lead them to create complex structures that resemble different forms through different mechanisms and means of creation. These objects, often humanized, can induce placebos and metaphorical experiences to the spectating mind that often goes from passive interaction to active observation, in the attempt of decoding what happens and transforms before their eye. They currently reside in Puerto Rico and dedicate their time to the study of objects and reality.

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8. Yaraní del Valle & Gabo Lugo / Music  / Performance / 20 min

Title: Pura’s Lágrimas

About the piece: Musical project developed by Yaraní del Valle and Gabo Lugo that fuses pop music with electronic sound supports and stage theatricality.aims to comment and provoke conversations about identity, gender inequality, her experience as an immigrant and the devastating effects of colonialism, the political condition that Puerto Rico has been a victim of for more than a century.

About the artist: Yaraní Del Valle Piñero is a Puerto Rican actor, singer, dancer, educator, cultural promoter, and activist based in New York City. Her interdisciplinary approach to artistic creation has led her to train and to collaborate with theater directors, choreographers, musicians, filmmakers, writers, and educators as a performer, co-creator and/or curriculum developer. Some of her projects include CHAMACAS,  ChicaPReneurs, Seniors In Motion and Pura’s Lágrimas and latest co-founder of Caicú, a nonprofit organization that serves as a cultural platform to empower Puerto Rican artists beyond geographical barriers.

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9. Lizbeth Román / Music / 40 min

About the piece: Original music that fuses the Caribbean bohemian with multiple rhythms and a Lyric of the everyday that joins the poetic with the street jargon.

About the artist: Lizbeth Román is a Puerto Rican songwriter, theater and singer. With her scenic force accompanied by the porosity and intensity of her voice, Lizbeth has established herself in the independent scene with her original music that fuses the Caribbean and bohemian vibe with multiple rhythms and a lyric of the everyday that connects the poetic with the street jargon.

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10. Alejandro Aldarondo  / Art Installation / Site-Specific

Title: Durational

About the piece: Site-specific art installation uses threads or strings that seeks to trace our multiple routes. Uniting as a collective, migrants from here and there. Respecting our qualities and differences, exalting the reasons of movement of each one, looking for a common place from which to leave, is born this installation of threads that looks for the earth and wants to take root. 

About the artist: Visual artist Puerto Rican, is dedicated to build facilities with textiles and thread in open spaces. Design and make clothes. Artist / installer, performer, designer, costume designer and dancer. He has a bachelors degree in Interdisciplinary Studies illustration and Drama. Associate Degree in Fashion Design. Has worked on several projects for: Wire / Mezzanine · PR / NYC / The great fantastic circus  and the fashion event: Bohemian Sunset.

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About TheaterLab co-producers:

MEZCOLANZA NYC 2017 – 12th Edition

Mezcolanza is a cultural platform born in 2013 in the city of Buenos Aires produced by Helen Ceballos. It gathers short pieces of artists and multi-disciplinary collectives in order to maintain a live and open stage for the processes and creations of emerging artists in different cities around the world. We aim to erase distances and expose pieces of author, which account for the social reality that is lived in our changing environments. To date, Mezcolanza has hosted over 250 artists among the cities of Buenos Aires, New York and San Juan de Puerto Rico. On this occasion, Mezcolanza visits the city of New York for the third time and celebrates its twelfth edition. We have convened 14 multidisciplinary artists. These artists work in theater, performance, movement, music, improvisation, construction, musical composition, costume making, sculptures, sound and video art. In this edition of the Festival Loisaida and within the framework of the Theater Lab. Mezcolanza presents the urban interventions of 14 outstanding artists from the local and international scene of Puerto Rico, Latin America and the United States, interlacing the scenic discourses of these creative artists with their status as permanent immigrants.

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