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.
