Projects
Life changing experiences propel the artist onto soul searching, passion filled creations. For me, surviving a civil war led to the most important and beautiful art project of my life. Andares El Salvador was born in 2014 from a conversation about forgiveness with my contemporary dance teacher and friend, Anne Bluethenthal, herself an accomplished and socially committed choreographer of 30 years. She directed Andares, and I became her associated director. Together we created an emotional landscape on which she designed what some critics have called “a powerfully beautiful living map of the Salvadoran revolution.” Yes, those words perfectly describe the perfect meeting of geography and dance on stage.
Andares brought back the terror, love, and hope inside the revolutionary and survivor in me, but it mostly brought up an urgency to communicate truths and questions bottled up inside me because I just had not been able to utter them. This art piece opened me up, grounded me and connected me with others in similar circumstances. The results were astounding. Three consecutive sold out nights of a heart piercing beautiful evening long performance in the National Theater of El Salvador in June of 2017 and a long overdue conversation among survivors of the war. More presentations followed the subsequent year by popular demand and at the request of the Ministry of Culture of El Salvador.
Beyond the transforming force Andares unleashed in me, the piece also immersed me into an all encompassing production process that went from the mere idea of creating the piece to a full-flesh international collaborative multidisciplinary art production (dance, song, poetry, drama) between an American non-profit art association, ABD Productions, and the Government of El Salvador. This fantastic learning curve has been tremendously helpful in my artistic growth.
In hindsight, every art project before Andares has led to it, and many more are now branching out from it.
Direction, Co-direction and Collaboration in Art Performance Projects
2018-present. Assist and collaborate with Arenas Dance Company director Susana Arenas in the development of concepts for choreographies and the production of company performances. Co-developed the concept behind Arenas’ number “Manos de Mujeres a la Obra” (Women’s Hands at Work) for the International Ethnic Dance Festival in August 2018. Assisted in the production of the evening-long presentation “Eso Sí: Más que bailar por Cuba bailaremos en Cuba” (One Thing’s For Sure: More Than Dancing In Cuba We’ll Dance For Cuba) in October 2019. Currently I’m collaborating with both Arenas and Cuba Caribe in the production Adá Ará: She Who Would Be Queen a show to be presented in September of 2021 funded by the Gerbode Arts Foundation.
2015-20. World cultures and community building facilitator for SNAP, a social program of Life Long Medical Care. Under La Juana Clark, SNAP Activity coordinator, organized multicultural activities, group discussions, and performances for a group of low-income African-American residents of Richmond, CA, who suffer a range of disabilities to enhance their social participation and sense of social identity. In 2017 Directed 12 of these residents in the multidisciplinary (song, poetry and spoken word) art piece “Getting To Know US,” presented at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, Richmond, CA in August of 2015. The piece presents specific aspects of the participants’ stories, which emerged from personal interviews and collective dialogue I conducted over a six-month period. They speak of the struggles of forging non-nuclear families– given the absence of one or both parents–with the help of relatives and friends. They also speak of their work contributions to the Bay Area while dealing with social and environmental injustices. Directing this piece involved as much community leadership as it did artistic directorship.
With colleagues and clients from SNAP Senior Network Activities Program at the Life Long Medical Care annual gala dinner (2019)
2009-2018. Choreograph and train groups of student performers for community events, including the Oakland Dance Festival (Oakland, CA April 2018), The Beat Berkeley Performing Arts annual showcase (Berkeley, CA 2012 to 2017), San Francisco Bay Area Cuban Festival (San Francisco, CA 2016, 2017) Damasceno’s 25th Anniversary Celebration (Berkeley, December 2010), Brazilian Breeze (Berkeley, December 2011), Brasasrte’s Cubahía (Berkeley, December 2009).
2014-17. Associate Director, ANDARES, an international multidisciplinary social science art project on El Salvador’s civil war, its historical memory and social reconstruction. Completed four months of ethnographic research on war survivors over four trips to El Salvador in 2015. Analyzed information for script. Work premiered in the San Francisco International Art Festival in May 2015 and premiered in El Salvador in June 2016. Subsequently, it was co-produced by Secretaria de Cultura de la Presidencia of El Salvador and presented a second time in El Salvador in March of 2017. ABD Productions, Anne Bluethenthal, Artistic Director.
Arenas Dance Company at MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana. San José, CA. Nov 2015.
1995. Co-creation of “La Promesa,” a twenty-six-minute video documentary of a pilgrimage from Havana to the sanctuary of San Lázaro that illustrates the contesting voices of a society attempting to construct a sense of future in times of conflict and crisis. Distributed by the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, selected for screening in the Margaret Mead International Film Festival in 1995. Merit Award, LASA, 1995. Julio Ramos, director.