from Plaza Ché, with love
Day 2 and T-3 hours till premiere tonight. As Montzerrat and I walked through the campus of the National University of Colombia this morning, I took photos of some of the graffiti on the buildings. It’s an interesting campus where students really express themselves and it’s evident in the politically charged art everywhere. In the plaza – appropriately titled “Plaza Ché” -there’s a huge image of Ché Guevara and the words: “We’re sons of the revolution. Our souls scream for liberation.”
We’re still setting up the space at the university. The lighting and additional electrical outlets were supposed to have been taken care of this morning, but surprise – they weren’t done. That’s not a diss against any of the Encuentro folks, who have been super-friendly and helpful. They’ve been bending over backwards to fix things. One of the curators that we’ve been working intensely with, Nicolas, has been an absolute doll, and so have the rest of the crew. I know it will all come together.
We’re dressing the space with various and sundry costumes, wigs, and other funky accoutrement so we and visitors to our installation/performance can create different ‘characters’ that will then be recorded into Seesmic and projected. We’ll then use these live+recorded elements to improvise live dance performances, which will then be posted to Seesmic as well, creating a recursive loop of improvised performances. I think we’ll start with projecting some of Tiil’s visual conversations since that was one of the first video conversations that inspired us to create this piece. Both Montzerrat and I love movement, improvising and philosophically questioning the boundaries of performance. The theme of the Encuentro festival is “Staging Citizenship” – so it seems a perfect time and space to be staging our own performance that crosses the borders between on and offline citizenship, from Plaza Ché, with love.
