SUSTENTO: from La Performera to La Mujer Maravilla

AWILDA RODRÍGUEZ LORA

SUSTENTO: from La Performera to La Mujer Maravilla

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.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

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.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

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. 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 performed at Brooklyn Museum, 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).

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).