Cacao: A Venezuelan Lament

A story of two cousins – one from Toronto and one from a cacao farming village in Venezuela – who reunite during the euphoric San Juan Celebrations. This multi-disciplinary dance production is a convergence of Afro-Venezuelan dance genres and Canadian contemporary dance, honouring the labour, love, and sweat of the living knowledge-holders who farm in Venezuela’s cacao communities.

Cacao: A Venezuelan Lament is a co-production in developmnent with Aluna Theatre.

Victoria Mata is a Toronto-based Canadian-Venezuelan dance artist, choreographer, director, and activist. In each of these, she combines an evolving feminism with her passion for expressive arts therapy. Mata’s choreography and her personal dance expression generate a dialogue between performance and embodied cultural memory. Mata’s sensibility to inclusion and the nuances of  border stories is rooted in her eclectic upbringing in Venezuela, France, United States and Canada. Her career was initially sculpted by auto-pedagogical, self-directed training, which was followed by residencies and professional trainings at the Banff Arts Centre, Counter Pulse, African American Art & Culture, Centro de Investigación Coreográfica del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes de México, The Biggot Foundation, Ballet Creole, Aluna Theater, Danza Corpus, Danza Fragmentada and Teatro Delle Radici.

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“I dance in response to global systemic barriers, converging contemporary and traditional forms imagining the alternative, our otherness; the unconquered.”
– Victoria Mata