This Bridge Called My Ass (2019) | Miguel Gutierrez
This Bridge Called My Ass (2019) Chocolate Factory Theater; Image Credit: Paula Lobo ; Featuring Miguel Gutierrez and Xandra Ibarra
This Bridge Called My Ass is the second collaboration with artist and choreographer Miguel Gutierrez. Approaching my role as collaborator, dramaturg, art bruja, director, to build this work alongside Gutierrez gave way to so much unexpected and wonderfully funny, dark, strange, deep, making. Premiering January 2019 as part of American Realness at the Chocolate Factory Theater and now touring nationally and internationally. It is a wild gift to continue to connect with these freaks in places near and far to speak and move and scream and unravel. Read a little more about our project and who is with us below!
In This Bridge Called My Ass, six Latinx performers map an elusive choreography of obsessive and perverse action within an unstable terrain of bodies, materials and sound. A formal logic binds the group and propels them to create an ever-transforming world where they are at once autonomous and connected, complicating the idea of identity. Latin-American songs and the form of the telenovela are exploited to show how familiar structures contain absurdity that reveal and celebrate difference. The title is a play on This Bridge Called My Back (ed. Cherrie Morága and Gloria Anzaldua), a seminal 1981 anthology of Third Wave feminist essays that explores identity and critiques white feminism. Its calls for intersectional awareness and political resistance eerily resonate in our time now and also reveal the limitations of discourse to imagine new ways of being together.
Created by Miguel Gutierrez
in collaboration with the performers: Alvaro Gonzalez, John Gutierrez, Xandra Ibarra, nibia pastrana santiago, Evelyn Sanchez Narvaez
Dramaturg/Assistant Director: Stephanie Acosta
Lighting Design: Tuçe Yasak
Prop Design and Construction: Matthew Shalzi
Recording Engineer: Rosana Caban
Original music created by Miguel Gutierrez. In real time music by all the performers.
Original text written by Miguel Gutierrez with selections from: traditional trabalenguas (tongue twisters), and the following telenovelas: Rubi, Betty La Fea, La Esclava Isaura, Dueños del Paraiso, El Extraño Retorno de Diana Salazar, Marimar and Maria La Del Barrio.
