SUSTENTO: from La Performera to La Mujer Maravilla
SUSTENTO: from La Performera to La Mujer Maravilla is a lecture-performance by the transdisciplinary artist, Awilda Rodríguez Lora, also known as “La Performera.” Stories, movements, and songs are strategies used by La Performera to invite the audience to reflect on the concept of sustento (sustenance) as a complex and vital idea for survival in creative and everyday practices. As a performance choreographer, Rodríguez Lora challenges traditional notions of womanhood, sexuality, and autonomy, examining relationships between the economy of living, corporeality, and the contemporary art market.
Awilda Rodríguez Lora (San Juan, PR) is a performance choreographer. 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 potentiate 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 Hispanic Caribbean, Rodríguez Lora’s performances traverse multiple geographic histories and realities.
Free, but reservations required. Reserve tickets here.
Sustento is co-presented by DiverseWorks and the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston for CounterCurrent19, a free festival of performance, installation, and ideas, April 19 – 14, 2019.
Awilda Rodríguez Lora is included in Collective Presence, a curatorial project organized by DW Assistant Curator Ashley DeHoyos that addresses current social and political issues impacting the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Rodríguez Lora is in residence at DiverseWorks from April 8 – 14, and is conducting a workshop and performance, Anatomy of Our Land/Anatomía de Nuestra Tierra, April 13 & 14.
Collective Presence programs are presented in conjunction with the Latino Art Now! 2019 National Conference on Latino Art, a program of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research and hosted by the University of Houston’s Center for Mexican American Studies and the Smithsonian Latino Center (April 4 – 6, 2019).