Corpus Festival at EMPAC modeled belonging in friction.
Yanira Castro gathered us around a table of divine food prepared by Ria Ibrahim of Soul Fire Farm to articulate, and with Taína Asili, to *sing* the histories of this land, as told by Yiyi Mendoza, Jude Abu Zaineh, and María Firmino-Castillo. We must learn to steward this place, and dance to survive.
At EMPAC’s entrance, Kate Ladenheim’s Monumental Death incited our collective falling and rising, inflating the flaccid body of a monumental figure revealing the invisible labor, sacrifice, and rehearsed gesture required to sustain forms of heroism and authority. Its shadow loomed over our supper in the mezzanine below.
Raft was built from the detritus of imperialism to be collectively inhabited through sound, story, and shared action. A kind of spaceship in revolt — elements of the environment shifting to mirror natural disaster, social upheaval, the powerful scary genius of precarity: how it forces us to imagine new forms of relation, care, and survival.
In the Concert Hall, Annie-B Parson & Alla Kovgan’s mega film installation The Oath vibrated color and sound, tracing the seduction and danger of moving as one body.
Spanning EMPAC’s glass bridges, Meg Foley & Carmichael Jones’ Primordial blurred body against landscape — queer gestation, geology, and transformation traced through breath, movement, fabric, and stone.
Arabella Stanger & María Firmino-Castillo’s Dancing Land, Dancing Power talk seeded so much of Corpus: choreography as embodied practice and contested terrain, where land, power, and resistance remain deeply entangled.
Thuto Durkac-Somo, Jonathan González & Mario Gooden’s Black Holes Ain’t So Black stunned. It demanded a liberation that unfolds across cosmological scales. Impossible to encapsulate, just see it if you can.
And nibia pastrana santiago’s preámbulo gently unmade the habits and power dynamics we carry into the theater. Dissolving the familiar choreography between performer, audience, and architecture, it opened space to see through those walls and onto something generative.
Gratitude to
@taraaishist for conjuring, to the wizardry of
@empac_rpi , to the artists, always.
