In 2017 Celeste Miller (soloist/USA) and Dora Arreola, Artistic Director of Mujeres en Ritual Danza-Teatro (Mexico/USA), received a National Performance Network Creation Fund grant in for a three year collaboration to create a physical theatre/dance work with text for three women performers: Dora, Celeste and Miroslava Wilson, artistic director of Pendulo Cero Danza Contemporanea/ Mexico. The process was put on hold when lead artist Celeste was diagnosed with cancer, and then just as she was clear and the the project was about to go back online - COVID. The piece finally premiered in June 2022 at the Museum of Fine Art, St. Petersburg, FL. Upcoming dates: Coslada Radial Festival Madrid September 2022, and Grinnell College April 2023.
The work was created through a multi-site process of building/collaborating in our various locations and with our communities in those places. Iowa, Florida, USA; and Tijuana and La Paz, Mexico.
Dora Arreola
DESCRIPTION:
Bilingual (English/Spanish) open-air (sometimes), interactive performance, created by three women from different generations and different geographic locations—Celeste Miller (US), Miroslava Wilson (MX), and Dora Arreola at the edge of the two, with musicians Chip Epsten (US) and Siki Carpio (MX and Spain) The artists interact in imagined and real edges of memory, incantation and incarnation, encountering the hidden stories of three pantheonic deities from each artist’s location of place. Xochiquetzal, Cihuacaotl (also known as La LLorona) and Lilith (Adam’s “first” wife). Using story, movement and music these intersecting narratives of defiance pose alternative knowledges of resistance making. 75 minutes. 5 performers with live music, or 3 performers and recorded tracks.
For thousands of years in all corners of the war-oriented, conquest driven socieites around the world, the deities who gave us insights into dual power: like fertility AND death; have been transformed into at best ghastly and hostile figures, and more often – just erased. We explore these corrupted tales for, and with, those who find themselves at odds with everything around them. Rising to the challenge of inventing and creating places to speak out, to create, to thrive and laugh.
AT WATER’S EDGE/AL FILO DEL AGUA is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund project co-commissioned by Art2Action, in partnership with Grinnell College. Additional support comes from the NPN Artist Engagement Fund and the Ford Foundation.
AT WATER’S EDGE/AL FILO DEL AGUA received a NPN Documentation & Storytelling grant in fall 2022, to document the performance for the Radial Festival.
Additional funding through a grant from the Network of Ensemble Theaters’ Travel & Exchange Network (NET/TEN), supported by lead funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
AT WATER’S EDGE/AL FILO DEL AGUA is an Art2Action A2A Original.