As a part of the continuing exhibition “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Artwork within the Wake of Hurricane Maria” on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, Awilda Sterling-Duprey will carry out “Lacks Criticality,” directed by Merián Soto, on March 3, 4 & 5, 2023, at 7:00pm (EST). This efficiency will happen on Ground 3, within the Susan and John Hess Household Gallery and Theater.
In Lacks Criticality (2018–23), choreographer Awilda Sterling-Duprey attracts on the phenomenological forces of Hurricane Maria and their influence on Puerto Rican residents’ our bodies, minds, feelings, and the bodily atmosphere. The efficiency integrates abstractions of Yoruba dance traditions and the best way these reference forces of nature. A specific focus is the dances of Oyá, goddess of the wind, storms, and lightning, whose choreographies transfer from slowness to violence, just like the pressure of a hurricane. The meteorological phenomenon develops round a middle, altering the wind and water, destroying every thing in its path. On this iteration of Lacks Criticality, Sterling-Duprey will carry out alongside Batá drummers.
The title of the piece references myriad convoluted responses by observers to unknown cultural contexts, in addition to the uncooked qualities intrinsic to this structured improvisation.
Carried out by Awilda Sterling-Duprey
Directed by Merián Soto
Lighting by Marién Vélez
That includes Jainardo Batista, Rafael Monteagudo, and Román Díaz
Awilda Sterling-Duprey is a central determine in Puerto Rico’s cultural arts scene. Equally celebrated as a painter, efficiency artist, and dancer, Sterling-Duprey’s work interweaves performing her work and installations. Conceptual artwork and Dada are main influences in her work, as are Caribbean cultural and non secular traditions. For greater than forty years, she has created and carried out experimental dance works combining Afro-Caribbean dance and trendy experimental motion in Puerto Rico and New York Metropolis, and all through Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Sterling-Duprey attended the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño, San Juan; the College of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras; and earned an MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. She is a founding member of Pisotón, the experimental dance collective that reworked Puerto Rico’s dance and efficiency scene within the Eighties. She is a recipient of quite a few fellowships and artist residencies, together with a USA Fellowship in Choreography (2010), Tree of Life grant (2019), Mass MOCA residency (2022), Rauschenberg Residency (2022), and Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2022). Her work, Blindfolded, an ongoing efficiency wherein the artist attracts blindfolded whereas listening to recorded excerpts of straight-ahead jazz improvisation, was featured within the 2022 Whitney Biennial.
Merián Soto is a dancer, choreographer, video, and improvisation artist. She is the creator of the aesthetic-somatic dance practices and methodologies. Her greater than forty-year profession in dance has spanned varied creative actions. A central determine within the Eighties and ’90s Latina group arts actions in New York Metropolis, Soto has collaborated extensively with visible artist Pepón Osorio on critically-acclaimed interdisciplinary works comparable to Historias (1992–99) and Familias (1995), created in collaboration with eight South Bronx households. Soto can be identified for her experiments with Salsa in critically-acclaimed works comparable to Así se baila un Son (1999) and La Máquina del Tiempo (2004). Since 2005, she has developed Department Dancing, a meditative apply that investigates consciousness in efficiency. She is a professor of dance at Temple College in Philadelphia, the place she has developed Modal Observe, the improvisational methodology now practiced broadly by choreographers in Philadelphia, New York, Puerto Rico and past. Her most up-to-date work, ¡Fenomenal! Rompeforma 1989–1996, a documentary on the celebrated Latinx dance and efficiency pageant, co-directed and produced with Viveca Vázquez, will premiere in February 2023.
Marién Vélez has labored as a lighting technician and impartial lighting designer in New York Metropolis, Buenos Aires, and in her house nation of Puerto Rico. Vélez obtained her MFA in lighting design at Parsons College of Design, the place she studied architectural, stage, and social lighting–a design method that includes the social and cultural features of impacted communities. Vélez’s venture expertise consists of places of work, retail, mixed-use environments, and public areas. Along with her work as a lighting designer, Vélez is the co-founder of twenty-two studio and a member of the social lighting group Girls in Lighting. The group helps low-income communities with lighting installations and workshops. She is presently finding out the post-hurricane influence {of electrical} lighting in Puerto Rico and designing lighting options that might be carried out in public areas within the affected communities.
Jainardo Batista is a Puerto Rican singer and percussionist who comes from a household with a protracted custom in music and theater in Puerto Rico. Since arriving in New York Metropolis in 1993, he has been concerned within the music scene, collaborating with rumberos, soneros, and salseros. In 1994, he turned closely concerned in son cubano, a synthesis of African and Spanish types broadly thought-about to be Cuba’s nationwide music. Over time he additionally developed deep ties to conventional Puerto Rican bomba, plena, salsa, rumba, and timba. He has carried out Cuban music with many teams in New York and internationally. Batista maintains an energetic efficiency schedule in New York Metropolis.
Rafael Monteagudo is a drummer, percussionist, and composer. He arrived within the U.S. in 2000 from Havana. His areas of focus embrace jazz, funk, fusion, Latin jazz, and Afro-Cuban music. Monteagudo continued his research on the Escuela Nacional de Arte and later on the Félix Varela conservatory in Havana. He has carried out at prestigious festivals, such because the Havana Jazz Competition and Cubadisco. In North America, Monteagudo has carried out at venues and music festivals comparable to Lincoln Heart, Central Park SummerStage, the Jazz Gallery, Joe’s Pub, BANFF Worldwide Workshop in Jazz and Artistic Music, Blue Word, Scullers Jazz Membership, and the Greene House at WNYC, amongst others. Along with his work as a touring and recording performer and musician, Monteagudo is usually featured in workshops on the Latin American Folks Institute in Maryland and in percussion grasp courses at varied universities within the U.S.
Román Díaz is a Cuban-born grasp percussionist and a “residing repository” of Afro-Cuban tradition. He’s a famous scholar of Cuban non secular and folkloric music in addition to a composer and performer of up to date Afro-Cuban music and jazz. He has carried out and recorded with Cuban diva Mercedíta Valdes, Jane Bunnett, Juan Carlos Formell, Paquito D’Rivera, Orlando “Puntilla” Rios, and Danilo Pérez in addition to the Afro-Cuban folkloric teams Yoruba Andabo, Raices Profundas, and Los Marqueses de Atares. He has carried out at famend venues comparable to Lincoln Heart, the Kennedy Heart, and the Smithsonian Museum. Díaz has traveled globally, performing and instructing grasp courses on Afro-Cuban tradition and percussion in Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, Israel, and Panama, and has taught at Havana’s Escuela Nacional de Instructores de Arte and been a visitor lecturer at Berklee School of Music, Harvard College, Yale College, Rutgers College, Humboldt State College Afro-Cuban Camp, and the New College. [. . .]
For extra data, see https://whitney.org/occasions/lacks-criticality