Presentation

This year's edition is co-directed by Carolina Tabares Mendoza, Karen Palafox, Diana Morales and César Aragón. The goal of Performática is the facilitation of engaged dialogue and collaboration between artists of all media with an interest in reflecting on the basic importance of their relationship to the movement arts.

Together we strive towards a space for shared community responsibility, and a platform for realizing personal agency. Hierarchies between students, teachers, history, styles, and economics are destabilized in order to invite alternative ways of being in our practice.

Defining the Forum

The operative languages for Performática are Spanish and English. If you are working in another language please have your written material translated into either English or Spanish before applying.

We are asking that all participants in Performática 2016 be willing to adapt and evolve initial proposals in order to generate actions that emerge from the collective tendencies and needs of the event itself. We would like to imagine that Performática can be a living breathing temporal organism rather than a collection of prefabricated presentations of already proven notions.

The 1st stage will consist of a selection committee reviewing the proposals and determining which projects lend themselves to participation within the model we are laying out. This year the selection committee will consist of a group of artists, external to the central organizing committee of Performática, who have attended the festival in previous years and understand its mission. This committee will evaluate proposals anonymously, i.e. without identification data of each artist. Considering this, we suggest you communicate your interests with the highest level of clarity in the spaces given in the application form. Criteria will include: viability, clarity of intent, contribution to diversity, and empathy with the mission of Performática.

After the 1st stage that will conclude November 22nd, 2015, with the notification of selected proposals, selected artists will have three weeks in which to email a signed commitment letter (provided by Performática) signalling your intention to participate. Participants who do not send this letter will be removed from consideration and their places offered to applicants on the waiting list. In January there will be deadline for any further publicity/program information or other administrative data that will aid the organizers in formulating the calendar for the forum. Students and participating artists will then register for participation in classes and workshops in late February or early March.

For this edition of Performatica we have revisited the origins, noticing how the context in which we develop our practice has changed. Taking into account the conditions found now, we propose the following themes to be considered as a guide in your application for the festival:

Guiding Questions for Performatica 2016

Borders

There are progressively more migrations, while at the same time spontaneous communities arise as unities to hold this situation.

As an alternative approach to an economic model in times of manifest crisis, ‘trueque’ (barter) is coming to the forefront of social practice. The economy of affection is reclaiming its original place.

The migratory phenomenon travels between boundaries and frontiers that establish how we inhabit them. Border is a place where time and space change.

How do geopolitical circumstances affect and transform the way we develop our creative processes?

Local shared boundaries

How do we understand the time and space we share?

Do we take agency in the inevitable transformations of our boundaries?

How and where does these boundaries transform?

At the moment of presenting a choreographic work, each person as an audience, dancer, artist, comes from a different background, a different experience. What does sharing a performative space implies?

In which way the roles of spectator and performer are dilated during this experience?

Time in your edges

Where do you come from?

When did your practice start today?

Do you remember what you did five minutes ago?

How do you make conscious the experience of every moment during your practice while it happens?

Founded by Mayra Morales and Ray Eliot Schwartz, professors of dance at Fundación Universidad de las Américas, Puebla, Performática is a festival, a conference, a workshop, a community builder, an exchange project, and a creative vision.

Inspired by years of exposure to international workshops, performance festivals, academic conferences, and community art projects, Performática aims to synthesize the best of these events into a unique forum. The event brings together an international cadre of practicing dancers, choreographers, theorists, and teachers of contemporary dance and related movement arts.

Over the course of the forum, workshops, roundtable discussions, and performances will be convened with the goal of facilitating international and intercultural exchange of practices, knowledge, theory and culture as related to the contemporary discourse of body movement, expression, and philosophy.

Etymology and Concept

The word PERFORMÁTICA comes from Latin: PER, FORNIR and MATOS.

And so, the meaning of Performática could be: giving life through movement in action and thought, beyond defined form, towards change and transformation.

Our motto then, has become: the concept of generous exchange. We wish to open diverse and alternative performative spaces through which we can facilitate a continual transaction among artists, creators, thinkers, academics, students, audiences, individuals and groups who have the desire to share their practices, thoughts and philosophies. We encourage acceptance towards any artistic discipline with a focus on movement and the body, the other and the difference. We like to believe that these principles are the beginning of tolerance and respect for cultural and intellectual diversity.

History

The first Performática took place 15-23rd of March, 2007 in Puebla, Mexico. The second took place March 24-April 4, 2008. The third, April 13th-25th, 2009. Spanning generally between 9 and 11 days, with - in 2009, over 28 different performance events over the course of the forum (as well as workshops, papers, dance films, events for children, and discussions) the public impact was in the thousands.

In 2008, along with over 150 participating artists - representing 70 groups, there were over 104 individual workshops offered and 198 Mexican students registered. In 2009 there were over 150 Mexican students, 84 individual workshops, and 72 groups representing over 125 individual artists. These participants had access, free of charge, to world-class teaching and performing over the course of the event. Thousands of audience members were, as well, given free access to these artists on the stages and sites of Cholula and Puebla.

In April 2011 Performática: Replanteando Prácticas happened. There were about 40 artists from Mexico, United States, Brazil, Argentina, Korea, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Ireland and Germany who gathered, along with around 150 students and a thousand audience members. Around 30 workshops in  contemporary dance, Somatic practices, improvisation, contact improvisation, dance and politics, voice and movement, dreams and movement, among others, were given. As well, performances were offered in theaters, open spaces, gardens, and informal studio showings, with other events occuring in alternative spaces such as the Don Apolonio Gallery in San Andrés Cholula and the Casa del Caballero Águila in  San Pedro Cholula.

During Performatica 2011 the idea presenting a workshop was reimagined and proposals were made for investigating the work of co-direction and collaboration within the framework of 11 laboratories, which offered a range of shared experiences and diverse methodologies for working and researching relationships in pedagogical and artistic practice. Within these laboratories, presenting artists collaborated with participating students to rediscover ways of working, explore  joint questions and conversations, and develop possibilities for future projects. They discovered the challenges of working together while also investigating options for new interactions.

One of the key questions of the 2011 event was: What happens when we don’t have an exact plan, when we are not entirely clear what we are doing and yet we keep committing to our practice? How can we interact within the search for our practice in the movement arts and what can we gain from that interaction?

A note about Communication

Performática’s focus on the movement arts is, in part, an attempt to locate the body as an integral site of communication. It is through the interface of physicality that we invest in moments that may transcend linguistic barriers. We do not believe, however, that bodies are neutral entities, untouched or uninformed by cultural difference. It is precisely through a direct engagement with one another’s corporeal histories that we hope to learn with one another.

Beyond the physical, Performática operates within a bi-lingual dynamic. English and Spanish are the operative spoken languages and while it is optimal to have some capacity in both, it is not a requirement for participation. There are enough people around with the facility to slide between them that not having fluency in one or the other should not deter you from participating, should you feel moved to do so.