auiga
by gizeh muñiz vengel in collaboration with Ernesto Peart Falcón and sounds by grisel gg torres
As we intend to create a new way of being with each other, we call ourselves into the vital presence of the world and into a deep and attentive presence with one another
We rest and stay quiet to listen
Speaking in movement and rhythm we vocalize a language that praises the long tides of the ocean, and polyrhythmic pulse of this place
We wonder
Our breathing bodies yield to gravity as a stuttering desire to feel the mutual attraction between our bodies and the land
We arrive
This piece is a poem that contains us to daydream together.
parte I - Ciudad de México - Enero 2024
rest RAW apocalypse faith tornasol UGAUGAUGA wateragua el peso eggg buried bodies unburied bodies
building a space to daydream collectively
the body is an imperfect and breakable entity vulnerable to a thousand and one insults.
Parte II - San diego State University - Marzo 2024
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drawing by Hazel Humphrey
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SPACE AND TIME RELATION
hello and welcome to the work in progress of auiga. we invite you to take your time arriving and landing. as you can see there are some cushions, chairs and mats in the space, you may sit or lay down on the floor, you may sit on a chair, you may stand, walk and move through the space, you can rest, you can breathe, you can sleep, you can do you, and we will do us, kind of everywhere…
This work is 35 minutes long with an 11:11 rest prelude
We arrive
We rest
We wonder
We breath with our whole bodies from the back of our heart
The 11:11 minutes start now
Thank you for being here
hello and welcome to the work in progress showing of auiga. we invite you to take your time arriving and landing. as you can see there are some cushions, chairs and mats in the space, you may sit or lay down on the floor, you may sit on a chair, you may stand, walk and move through the space, you can rest, you can breathe, you can sleep, you can do you.
This work is 35 minutes long with an 11:11 rest prelude
We arrive
We rest
We wonder
We breathe with our whole bodies from the back of our heart
The 11:11 minutes start now
Thank you for being here.
We will now transition to an integration process. Let’s gather in a circle. We will bring a table with papers, markers, and other resources for collaging together. You will also find some questions that can be answered through any medium: drawing, sketching, writing, mapping… while Ernesto and gizeh get changed.
Take your time
Give yourself time
Take time
Give time
This is the transition to our collective integration process where we gather in a circle around gizeh and Ernesto.
Come on over.
Take your time.
Check out the ending again. How does it look from here?
Here comes the paper, the markers, the tools for collaging together.
You find some questions that can be answered through any medium: drawing, sketching, writing, mapping… while Ernesto and gizeh take the next five minutes to collect themselves.
Take your time
Give yourself time
Take time
Give time
Did any dreams come true for you?
Were there any states mentally, physically and/or energetically that you went through during the piece and you would like to share with us?
What is your relationship with rest?
How was it for you to experience the piece from a horizontal plane (if you were laying down)?
What kind of permission do you need to feel more comfortable in your own experience while witnessing this performance?
Did you feel like you had time to wonder?
Could you remember a time in your life where you felt just like this? How old were you?
AURIGA/ARA/AUGA auigaa auiga AUUUUIga
tú qué crees que signifique?
auiga
it means feeling the polyrhythmic pulse of this place
to owning up being a creature of earth
it is a new way of speaking, one that enacts our interbeing with the earth rather than binding us to it. a language that opens our senses to the sensous in all its multiform strangeness.
a stuttering reply to an enigmatic cosmos that already spoke to us in a myriad of tongues
by sheltering ourselves from the harrowing vulnerability of bodied existence we insulate ourselves from the deepest wellsprings of joy. This animal body, for all itrs suceptibility and vertigo, remains the primary instrument of all our knowing, as the capricious earth remains our primary cosmos.
Maybe our inherited concepts (our ready definitions and explanations) serve to isolate our intelligence from the intimacy of our creaturely encounter with the strangeness of things,
to come more directly into felt relation with the wider
Verbal langauage lived first in the shaped breath of utterance, it laughed and stuttered on the tongue long before it lay down on the page and longer still before it arrayed itself in rows across the glowing screen.
We speak in song, in rhythm, like the crickets and ocean waves. We speak a language of movement and rhythm that praises the animate world.
We call ourselves into the vital presence of the world and into deep and attentive presence with one another.
My shadow, my personal night. Fire and sleep
We sleep allowing gravity to hold us
GRAVITY/eros - Yielding to the Eros contained in the gravitational draw. The lovelorn yearning of our body for the larger Body of Earth and of the Earth for us.
Gravity: the mutual attraction between our body and the Earth
omnidimensional plenitude
To be - means to breathe breathing bodies
breathing bodies, tangible bodies of thickness and weight
About the artists
We are three Mexican artists that are developing poetic mechanisms to respond to the need to find new pathways to collaboration in current times, in distance, and as we grow. Our sound and movement research is a practice that centers the body as a channeler, a sacred fluid object that surrenders identity. -As we sink further into these practices, the intention is to find both the limits and potential of the physical body by inciting play and pleasure in ephemeral spaces, sometimes memories. You will find care, beauty and intuitive precision in our grids.
Parte III Ohlone land June 2024
120mm by Kevin Martinez
gizeh muñiz vengel
They are dedicated to the study of being a -body-, through movement and stillness.
Her choreographic work responds to processes of grief and joy, with an arduous commitment to transformation and presence.
They recreate body stories through touch, relationship and movement that refine our attention and listening toward mastery of the art of being fully present in proximity and relationship with others.
Through her work, she creates spaces that allow them to play and divest from concepts of linearity in a creative process, with the intention of practicing freedom, and explore new paradigms of temporality, relationality and intimacy.
They insist on the importance of “thinking with the whole body” to imagine possibilities where their identity is not tokenized, but rather a departure point for experimentation, exploration and dance- making.
Her choreographic and teaching work has been shared in the United States, Mexico and Europe in festivals such as Improspeckje in Croatia, GUSH in San Francisco and 4x4 in Tijuana, to mention some.
gizeh is currently an artist in residency at CounterPulse, PUSH, BANDALOOP and in The Community Engagement Residency with Bridge Live Arts, and the 2023-25 Radiate fellow of RAWdance. gizeh is curator and producer of KH FRESH Festival, Performance Primers and Gatherings class series in the Bay Area.
grisel gg torres
gg torres is a mexican artist born and based on Ohlone Territory. As a sound and lighting artist, she has worked mainly for movement-based theatre works. GG enjoys every opportunity to explore improvisational scores and seeks to compliment whatever poetic dichotomy that is longing to be found. artistically, she is held by tight-knit ancestral
relatives, a subjugated and hungry earth, queers that push back, the special orbs above us, shadows, Aretha Franklin, and the mise-en-scène of every living moment. GG is currently serving as the Producing Technical Director at the San Francisco experimental dance venue CounterPulse (FKA 848 Performance Space) . You can also hear GG’s sound works in collaboration with cellist Peekaboo in the sound bath series Resting Between Waveforms and Coraiñia, an improvisational concert alongside Stephanie Hewett and Tyler Holmes. GG is excited and honored to return to the stage with Gizeh and Ernesto, we hope you enjoy the show rest.
Contemporary dancer and performer originally from Saltillo, México.
Interested in the search for new forms and ways of expressing.His work focuses on movement research and collaboration.
He has collaborated as a dancer and performer with international choreographers and groups like Damien Jalet (Belgium), Kaori Seki (Japan) Martha Hincapié (Germany), Vladimir Rodríguez (Colombia), Gilberto González (México) y Leandro Kess (Argentina) amongst others. He graduated from the Mazatlan Professional School of Dance in 2011 and has worked with companies such as Delfos Danza and CEPRODAC touring in America, South America, Europe and Asia.
resources used for the creation of this piece:
-becoming animal: an earthly cosmology by David Abrams
-Áltazor by Julio Cortázar
-The Queerness of Water: Troubled Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century by Jeremy Chow
Special thanks to:
Jess, Ron and Hazel Humphrey for their unconditional support for the creation of this piece 💛