la convivencia

Yanira Castro's work is rooted in communal construction as a rehearsal for radical democracy. She is an interdisciplinary artist born in Borikén (Puerto Rico), living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn), and working at the intersection of communal practices, performance, installation, and interactive technology. Yanira forms iterative, multimodal projects that center the complexity of land, citizenship, and governance in works activated and performed by the public. Since 2009, she’s created and performed with a team of collaborators as a canary torsi. Castro has recently been commissioned and presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater, New York Live Arts, MCA Chicago, The Invisible Dog Art Center, Abrons Arts Center, SPACE Gallery, PICA, and The Bates Dance Festival. Her work has recently been supported by Creative Capital, The Alpert Award, The MAP Fund, a NYFA Choreography Fellowship, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Gibney, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Marble House Project, and has received two Bessie Awards for Outstanding Production. Castro is a founding member of Creating New Futures (CNF), a group of arts workers who gathered at the start of the pandemic to address deep-rooted inequities in the performance field, with whom she co-authored two documents drafted as calls-to-action: “Working Guidelines for Ethics & Equity in Presenting Dance & Performance” and “Notes on Equitable Funding from Arts Workers”. acanarytorsi.org

nibia pastrana santiago, born in Caguas, Puerto Rico in 1987 and now based in San Juan and trained in dance and improvisation, develops site-specific “choreographic events” to experiment with time, fiction and notions of territory. She is co-editor, along with dance scholar Susan Homar of the book “Habitar lo imposible: Danza y experimentación en Puerto Rico” (2023) published by Editorial Beta-Local. The English edition Inhabiting the Impossible: Dance and Experimentation in Puerto Rico is set to come out this fall with the University of Michigan Press, under the series Studies in Dance: Theories and Practices. In 2022, the exhibition Choreopolitics: Brendan Fernandes & nibia pastrana santiago was presented at MASS MoCa.  nibia’s work has been commissioned by de Appel (2020) and the Whitney Biennial (2019), as well as supported by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña and the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative Fellowship (2020-2023). She is the author of the lazy dancer manifesto (2013). nibia holds an MFA in Dance with a Minor in Latina/o Studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a Postmasters in Performance and Scenography Studies from a.pass, Belgium. She worked as codirector at Beta-Local and for a period of five years served as the Dance Program Academic Coordinator at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, Santurce. She has collaborated and performed in works by DD Dorvillier, Jennifer Monson/iLand and Miguel Gutiérrez.

| April 25-29, 2024

la convivencia

la convivencia is an artist-fueled, intergenerational exchange of movement-based performing artists who self-identify as Puertorriqueñxs, having ancestry in the archipelago and living in Puerto Rico (Borikén) or in los Estados Unidos (Turtle Island). la convivencia in MANCC (convivencia: roughly translates to “living together”) will be exactly that, spending time together, something that doesn’t happen enough with institutional and creative support. Part of our colonial history and legacy is one of dispossession and separation, and sometimes alienation from one another. There are not many opportunities for us to be in communion—on the island, off the island, straddling the diaspora—and our intention is that this gathering will lead to more convivencias, seeding fresh ways of being, imagining, and activating together.

la convivencia is a call to congregate, to support one another, to share practices, and grapple with making work inside the U.S. and Puerto Rico. It is three days of exchange, of scoring, improvising, and dancing, intermixed with meals and conversations. 

We chose MANCC for this initial conversation because of Florida’s relation to the Caribbean. It is part of the Caribbean and home to many in the diaspora and yet, MANCC, has not yet been a part of these necessary conversations. We welcome this start.

Yanira Castro Negroni, nibia pastrana santiago and a group of artists to be announced are kicking off and organizing this convivencia.

  • Photos Coming Soon

Featured Artist

Faye Driscoll

Weathering
February 22 - 24
Carolina Performing
Arts, UNC Chapel Hill

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