Aravind Adyanthaya in Michigan

Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, this week! Performance and talk, Thursday, 6pm, G634 Haven Hall. Workshop, Friday, 1-5pm, requires preregistration: contact Larry La Fountain.

Thursday, January 19. The Latina/o Studies Program invites you to a performance by Puerto Rican artist Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya: "TRANSLATION/TRADUCCIÓN" with post-performance discussion. "TRANSLATION/TRADUCCIÓN" is an episode from Adyanthaya's piece "Prometheus Bound," a re-envisioning of Aeschylus' work. In this episode, Prometheus meets Io, a "cow-vaca woman".  The performance resembles a song, its lyrics ramifying through verbal and written scores, the rhythm of phonetics and the typing carrying it through. Body movements are often drawn from Latino popular singers and dancers, trying to explore the iconographic context of translation specific to the artist (a Puerto Rican living between the island and the mainland). What begins as Spanglish transforms into yet another idiosyncratic sign system.  The episode questions cultural images and specificity.  It dramatizes different registers of language precisely through this encounter with, Io, a maiden with the horns of an ox, a monster ("monstrua"), the other (foreign, creature, mutant, paradoxically the self) and in the untranslatable in it. The performance will be followed by a discussion about "escritura acto" and about Adyanthaya's work with Casa Cruz de la Luna, a grass roots experimental company based in the historical town of San Germán, Puerto Rico.  A short clip from "The Marquis de Sade is Afraid of the Sea", a project expanding escritura acto to a group/ensemble practice will be shown.  This presentation, which took place at a public square in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico will also serve as a springboard to talk about the different dynamics and politics involved in the occupation of public spaces. Cosponsored by Arts at Michigan/Course Connections, the Center for World Performance Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the School of Art and Design. Free and open to the public. 6pm, G634 Haven Hall.

Friday, January 20. "Escritura Acto" Workshop with Puerto Rican artist Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya. (4 hours, limited capacity, please contact Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes to pre-register.) "Escritura acto" is a form of theatrical poetics that explores the staging of the act of writing. Its setting is based on letting the spectators view the contents of what is written through a video projection of the document as it is being produced in the computer.  This mode of representation examines relationships between the writer and the written, the medium and the message, the audience/spectators and oral and written perceptions.  It also works to performatively explore notions of language hybridization and belonging in different cultural contexts. Automatic writing and contact improvisation principles will also be presented in the context of escritura acto. Some of the exercises will take the form of brief unipersonal and group pieces performed by the participants.  Participants can work in any language they choose. To register please contact Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. 1:00-5:00pm, G634 Haven Hall.