THE GUILTY PLEASURES I HAVEN’T EATEN. Malvin Montero
Lo Pecau que me faltan por comer [The Guilty Pleasures I Haven’t Eaten] offers a collective reflection on the risks of mass tourism and environmental pollution, two ills besieging the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean today. The piece activates sound-based and corporal postcards that combine dembow rap, Zumba and contemporary dance.
Malvin Montero. (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic). He started studying dance in 2003 at the Alina Abreu Dance Conservatory and has graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Danza de Bellas Artes (Endanza) and Pro Danza (Havana). He has a bachelor’s in Choreography and Dance Interpretation from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos ISDAl (Madrid). Malvin Montero creates, dances and directs. Trained by the composer Chefa Alonso, his extensive professional career includes classical academic dance, contemporary dance and free improvisation. One of the cruxes of his creative work is reflecting on diasporic corporality and its imaginaries.
PHOTO Abdiel Segarra
Instagram: @malvinstarlin
SAINT FROM AN AUTONOMOUS SUBSTRATE. Inés Sybille
Inés Sybille imagines possible encounters with deities from Haitian voodoo. In this activity, she does it by re-territorialising this religion’s syncretic strategy of survival. Inspired by some of the scenes in the life of the martyr Saint Agnes, the dancer goes out to meet Erzulie, the loa of love, beauty and motherhood, and her multifaceted faces. Might Erzulie be a map and a mirror despite the impossibilities of the diasporic body and the logics of colourism? Based on a dramaturgy impacted by stimuli from the Internet language, the friction between Saint Agnes and Erzulie and the insistence on Kuduro steps from Angola, Vooduness immerses herself in a state in which she can imagine a spiritual conversation.
Inés Sybille Vooduness is a dancer, cultural investigator and teacher. She invents fictitious encounters with deities from Haitian voodoo from her fields of choreography: Kuduro from Angola, coupé décalé from the Ivory Coast and dancehall from Jamaica. As an artist, she shapes this philosophical material and explores the possibility of producing existential awareness by re-territorialising these codes. In 2023, Inés was chosen to be a resident artist at La Casa Encendida with her performance Santa de sustrato autónomo [Saint from an Autonomous Substrate]. She is currently working on a co-production with the Festival TNT and the Teatro do Bairro Alto in Lisbon with her work Simbi en aguas astronómicas.
PHOTO La Casa Encendida/ Estudio Perplejo
MAMISARGASSA 3.0 & AND HER GUESTS. Annabel Guérédrat, Raphaël Gautier and Daniel Dantin
Annabel is presenting a powerful work that has been profoundly shaped by a reflection on ecology and the female condition. This new creation is part of the Ensárgassame series, which explores the burial rituals of a toxic seaweed: sargasso. We are in the year 2083, on a deserted island called Martinique No human, animal or plant has survived after centuries of colonisation, pollution, occupation and tourism. Only the sargasso remains. Mami Sargassa, a new genetically modified entity, has emerged. To stay alive, she buries herself in fresh sargasso. This act of sorcery enables her to be reborn and rehumanised and to give birth to new hybrid beings.
Annabel Guérédrat is an artist, choreographer, performer, ‘witch’ and Caribbean sorceress. Born in New Caledonia, she lives and works in Martinique, where she originally comes from and where she has set up her company Artincidence. She is trained in butoh, Pilates, yoga, ladja, krump and kyudo, a form of Japanese archery somewhere between a martial art and a Zen practice. She is also a practitioner body-mind centering®, a somatic practice that she uses to create organic performances that join the private and the political. She has created figures of modern witches and co-directs the Festival Internacional de Arte Performance, FIAP Martinique.
Daniel Dantin is a musician, drummer and percussionist extraordinaire who comes from a family of musicians. Music has been part of his life since a very young age. At eight, he began to take classes at SERMAC, although he had already started teaching himself. After earning his baccalaureate with a specialisation in music, he joined an arts school in Cuba for five years. After he graduated, he moved to Belgium for five years. He went back to Martinique in 2005 and is now a percussion teacher at SERMAC.
Raphaël Gautier began to play the guitar at the age of nine, initially interested in rock and its variations. In prep school, he leaned towards improvisational music and assembled his first bands. After earning his baccalaureate, he joined the Jazz à Tours school, where he was taught by Antoine Paulin and Guillaume de Chassy, among others. He earned a DEM in Jazz with honours in 2019, and his Rotor project won a composition award from SACEM. In 2020, he joined Pôle Sup’93, where Vincent Ségal and Julien Lourau teach.
PHOTO courtesy of the artist