CounterCurrent19 – Awilda Rodríguez Lora: SUSTENTO: from La Performera to La Mujer Maravilla

Stories, movements, and songs are strategies used by La Performera to invite the audience to reflect on the concept of sustento (sustenance) as a complex and vital idea for survival in creative and everyday practices. As a performance choreographer, Rodríguez Lora challenges traditional notions of womanhood, sexuality, and autonomy, examining relationships between the economy of living, corporeality, and the contemporary art market. Awilda Rodriguez Lora is part of Collective Presence, a curatorial project organized by DiverseWorks that addresses current social and political issues impacting the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

Awilda Rodríguez Lora (San Juan, PR) is a performance choreographer. She challenges in her work the concepts of woman, sexuality, and self-determination. These concepts are explored through the use of movement, sound, and video as well as through literal instantiations of an “economy of living” that either potentiate or subtracts from her body’s “value” in the contemporary art market. Born in Mexico, raised in Puerto Rico, and working in-between North and South America and the Hispanic Caribbean, Rodríguez Lora’s performances traverse multiple geographic histories and realities. In this way, her work promotes progressive dialogues regarding hemispheric colonial legacies, and the unstable categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Rodríguez Lora has performed at Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD), New York University, the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Dance Center, and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), among others. Her solo work has been recently featured at DEFORMES Performance Biennale (Chile), Posta Sur Performance Encounter (Chile), Independence Dom (Dominican Republic) and the Miami International Performance Art Festival (USA).

Awilda Rodríguez Lora is hosted in conjunction with DiverseWorks’s project, Collective Presence, and the Latino Art Now! 2019 National Conference on Latino Art.