TBA:20

luciana achugar

PURO TEATRO: a spell for Utopia

Co-Commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater

DATES

September 26 | 4:00 PM PDT PURO TEATRO: a spell for Utopia | CLOSED CAPTIONING | TICKETS/WATCH

September 30 | 5:00 PM PDT Outdoor Audience Gathering

LOCATION: Pioneer Courthouse Square | 701 SW 6th Ave.

FOLLOW @puro_teatro_a_spellfor_utopia on Instagram to fully experience this project!

DESCRIPTION

What is a theater without a theater? A dance without a dancer? Are the bodies of the audience no longer able to feel empathy, to be moved? What do we need a dance for in these times? Is the theater the sharing of ourselves in a space? Or is it simply the agreement, the framing as such? In these times of isolation can we perceive the theater in the body? Can our bodies be our sites? What of the spaces between the audience and the stage, between our bodies? The space of transference; the space that carries the empathetic response, the being moved, the moving, the feeling, the expansion and transformation of our perception during and after the magic of the theater…: The Spell!

PURO TEATRO: a spell for Utopia furthers achugar’s mission for making work as a practice of growing a new theater, a utopian theater; a practice of making theater as a practice of growing a collective body with the audience; an uncivilized body, a decolonized body, a utopian body. It embraces the dystopian reality of bodies that cannot touch one another, but can touch a screen, and proposes that our bodies become the site with our technologies as ritual objects and portals to other embodied realities. 

PURO TEATRO: a spell for Utopia seizes this moment of isolation to consider the possibility of the theater inherent in the intimacy of our own experience, within the spaces of our bodies, our homes, and our cities. A theater without theater, distilled to its essence by the artist “downloading” their work directly to the audience as a spell, an intimate incantation.

ARTIST BIO

luciana achugar (b. 1970) is a latinx immigrant from Uruguay; grew up mostly in Venezuela in political exile and developed her voice as a choreographer between New York and Montevideo, Uruguay. She makes work from the rage of being a LatinAmerican living in the belly of the Empire in a post-colonial world. She makes work as a practice of growing a new body; an uncivilized body, a decolonized body, a utopian body. She makes work as a practice of building a new theater, another/other theater, OTRO TEATRO, a utopian theater. She makes work as a practice of growing as one would grow a plant. She makes work with a desire to escape the oppression of the arrow of time; to arrive at a place of beyond time, ritual time, body time…

Since 2013 she has been developing her Pleasure Practice, a deeply sensorial embodied practice to allow for other knowledges to emerge from the knowing in the body, an embodied rebellion by practicing being in pleasure; a practice that she teaches internationally and that continues to inform her creative process and her relationship to making work as resistance and as a possibility for healing and mysticism.

Her work has been shown in most contemporary dance venues in NYC and many venues across the US such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN and the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX; as well as in a few Festivals in Europe, in Mexico, Cuba and in Uruguay. She was a two time Bessie Award recipient plus once nominated; and has received numerous accolades such as the Alpert Award in Dance, the Creative Capital Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant and the Guggenheim Fellowship.