Ep.80: Merendiando with Zuadd Atala from Teatro Línea de Sombra
October 12, 2022
Without hope, but with much love and much poetry… we really like reimagining people’s stories and we really like uncomfortable stories. So, what we’re here to do is make people uncomfortable in a poetic way. – Zuadd Atala
Meet Zuadd Atala from Teatro Línea de Sombra. Since 1996 Zuadd has worked with various international and national choreographers and stage directors. Her training and research are based on bodily practices, the inhabited installation, and the documentary scene. Zuadd is the Choreographer and one of the performers of Danzantes del Alba, and she was also part of the concept and creation of Pequeños Territorios en Reconstrucción. Both productions were part of the Rutas 2022 Festival.
Pequeños Territorios en Reconstrucción is the story of a place and its people, as well as a reflection on what it means to live through long-lasting violence. Each performance begins with an empty stage, like the empty terrain the women faced when they began to build the City of Women. Over the course of the performance, Zuadd and Alicia fill the stage with various objects– building a miniature city as the audience watches. A complex installation is then formed from cinder blocks with colored roofs, photos of the women of the City, explanation cards on wooden mounts, and many other objects. At the conclusion, the audience is invited onto the stage to get to know this City of Women in depth.
Danzantes del Alba is a phantom carnival which ritualizes the making of 36 festive costumes of the character, El loco de la danza. Several artisanal workshops created these 36 costumes, including a group of old communist workers, the home of a Central American migrant woman who was earning money by crossing the border, a women’s cooperative who rescued an abandoned place and turned it into a small textile factory, and a collective of gay activists on the border with Guatemala. Danzantes is a performative essay on the intersection of documentary research and the construction of landscapes on stage. At the end of this extraordinary dance / story, the audience is invited to explore the final installation and become part of the living landscape.
Our co-host for this episode is a Dora-nominated actress, creator, and contributor who lives in Toronto, but hails from the City of Mountains: Monterrey, Mexico, Sofia Rodriguez. Sofia had the opportunity to be the Narrator of Danzantes del Alba for the Rutas Festival presentation.
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