THE FLICKERING FLAME OF MEMORY

Santiago Mariño's Graduation project from HTA's MA Choreography and Performance program. The piece is a choreographic conversation with the things that are bound to disappear and the things that persist as I recall them in dance. It is a dialogue with remains that can’t be touched, with ghosts and wounds who dance between memory and forgetting. My body is the flesh manifestation of ancestral genealogies who have meshed through centuries of hybridization. My ancestors and I bear the ongoing injury of colonization, and my mestizaje in the world webs itself among southamerican cosmologies, western performativities of masculinity, and dance imaginaries. To acknowledge my body as a construct of mestizaje, is to recognize the layers of history, politics and poetics that reside within it. The work is about loss… letting go, learning to cope with the disappearance of things, what is no longer there, what dies a little, oblivion.

Concept, direction, performance: Santiago Mariño

Music, mixing and sound design: Tomás Ripoll

Light design: Dana Maxim

Costume design: Johanne Schröder

Dramaturgical Support: Morteza Zarei and Nargess Behrouzian

Vocal coaching: Marcelo Lucero

Graphic design: Christian Robles

Photo: Nargess Behrouzian

Special thanks to: Bojana Kunst, Xavier le Roy, kemelo nozipho sehlapelo, Antje Cordes, Simon Möllendorf, Alexandra Hennig, Aleksandar Dojcinovic.

Hessische Theaterakademie Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm Kulturamt Frankfurt am Main Kulturamt Gießen