SUSTENTO: From La Performera to La Mujer Maravilla

This seminar series brings together artists, scholars, researchers and organizers from South Africa, Mexico, U.S., Iran, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Botswana, Peru and Sweden, to share the interdisciplinary, aesthetic and transcultural nature of Black Study. 

Awilda Rodríguez Lora 

In this seminar section, we will move, listen, and explore the possibilities of our bodies and imagination. 
 
Are you ready to move? Movement equals revolution and both are inevitable, therefore transformation happens by us just being present. In this live virtual experience I will share my journey as a queer afro Puerto Rican woman/performer/choreographer/producer and my insatiable need to generate progressive dialoges about gender, race, sexuality, presence, decoloniality, freedom, and economies of being. As part of our encounter we will be collaborating with La Rosario Proyectos and  Foro Permanente del Performance, an artistic research, curatorial and editorial platform of performance in and from Puerto Rico. Together we will move as an act of liberation. 

Awilda is a performance choreographer and cultural entrepreneur. She challenges in her work the concepts of woman, sexuality, and self-determination. These concepts are explored through the use of movement, sound, and video as well as through literal instantiations of an “economy of living” that either potentiates or subtracts from her body’s “value” in the contemporary art market. 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 has been an invited guest artist at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD), New York University, the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Dance Center, and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), among others. Her solo work has been recently featured at DEFORMES Performance Biennale (Chile), Posta Sur Performance Encounter (Chile), Independence Dom (Dominican Republic) and the Miami International Performance Art Festival (USA).
 
She is currently the founding collaborator of La Rosario Proyectos in Santurce, 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. She is also the Academic Leader for the Dance Program at the Universidad de Sagrado Corazón. 

Seminar Resources

Experiments of Joy: a workbook - Link to order
All about love by bell hooks
Emergent Strategy by addrienne marie brown
BLACKSPACE: ON THE POETICS OF AN AFROFUTURE by Anaïs Duplan
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
laperformera.com: an interactive website of Awilda’s archive. 
Virtual Residency at Wexner Center for the Arts (2021)
 
@laperformera