la convivencia
April 24 – 29, 2024
Participants: José (Pepe) Álvarez, Javier Cardona Otero, Yanira Castro, Edrimael Delgado Reyes, Alicia Díaz, Alejandra Martorell, nibia pastrana santiago, Antonio Ramos, Awilda Rodríguez Lora, Crystal Sepúlveda, and Viveca Vázquez
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 was initiated by artists Yanira Castro and nibia pastrana santiago at MANCC, consisting of four days of exchange, scoring, improvising, and dancing, intermixed with meals and dialogues. Embedded scholar and artist Alejandra Martorell documented this seminal residency through a forthcoming essay reflecting on la convivencia and a video of artist interviews, created in collaboration with Yanira Castro, Nibia Pastrana Santiago and MANCC Media Specialist Chris Cameron.
Convivencia roughly translates to “living together”. Part of Puerto Rican artists’ colonial history is one of dispossession and separation from one another. la convivencia is meant as an antidote, providing the necessary institutional and creative support as an attempt to untangle these legacies. There are not many opportunities for Puerto Rican artists to be in communion—on the island, off the island, straddling the diaspora—and the intention for this gathering was to pave the way for more convivencias, seeding fresh ways of being, imagining, and activating together.
The residency was made possible, in part, with support from the Mellon Foundation.
For more information on la convivencia artists and schedule, see attached Artist Participant Packet PDF.
- Yanira Castro and Nibia Pastrana Santiago conceived this exchange and invited all of its participants. The artists attending la convivencia from Puerto Rico were José (Pepe) Alvarez, Edrimael Delgado Reyes, Awilda Rodríguez Lora, Viveca Vázquez, and nibia pastrana santiago. The following artists came from different places in the US: Javier Cardona Otero (Indiana University – Bloomington), Alicia Díaz (University of Richmond, VA), Crystal Sepúlveda (California), Antonio Ramos and Yanira Castro (New York City), and Alejandra Martorell (University of Texas at Austin).
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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 Experimental Media & Performing Art Center (EMPAC), The Chocolate Factory Theater, New York Live Arts, MCA Chicago, The Invisible Dog Art Center, Abrons Arts Center, PICA, SPACE Gallery, and The Bates Dance Festival. Her work has recently been supported by Creative Capital, The Alpert Award for Dance, Dance/USA Artist Fellow, The MAP Fund, a NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary & Choreography Fellowship, NYSCA Support for Artists, 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 Post-masters in Performance and Scenography Studies from a.pass, Belgium. She worked as co-director 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.