ITES began with a festival in partnership with The Magdalena Project on April 20 – 24, 2022. These five days included performances and gatherings with worldwide women, non-binary, and trans artists.

Performance Summaries

ANTIGONX is a queer Latinx story of liberation and connection to ancestors. The Greek story of Antigone is adapted to a Puerto Rican/Boricua context reflecting on the struggle for liberation, social change, and the right to mourn. Tiresias welcomes us as a guide who summons the spirits of Julia Antigona Guerra and Lorena Ismene Guerra. The Guerra siblings live in Abundancia, the island colony of the Empire of Glass, and have opposing views on how to respond to oppression and injustice. What is our role in the revolution? We listen.

Confesiones: A solo performance by Ana Correa, in which she shares her creative process with viewers in constant dialogue with her characters created in the works of her Yuyachkani group, especially those that emerged in the productions created in the period of political violence. Ana Correa is exposed as a person and character of her own work. Confesiones connects us with an actress who assumes the theater as a way of life, therefore, we can see the fusion of her condition as a woman, mother, citizen and actress, where the presence and the character are installed in a thin line of border between fiction and reality.

Daughter: A workshop with a performance outcome based on intimate and reflective personal biographies of Mother and Daughter relationships

Daughter was born of the desire to stage intimacy and the complex dyad of the mother/daughter relationship. The project continues an investigation by Jill Greenhalgh into presenting the authentic voices and embodied knowledges intrinsic to women’s experience. Greenhalgh has refined a creative process and presentation structure that works with local women and allows each manifestation of Daughter its distinct cultural and political inflections.

Fly Low, Sit High: Some themes that I am exploring are community, connection and the coming together through spiritual ascension, self realization and radical imagining. I hope to explore these themes by centering my black and indigenous queerness, ancestors, and my personal soul quest. Through artistic mediums of technical and pedestrian movement, storytelling, song and sound, poetry, set design and lighting.

Lightning: Lightning enters a world of the inner monsters we both need and deny. We are curious about dissolving the boundaries between the body, inner worlds, and nature. Explored through shadows and image, body and voice, puppets and inventions, song and silence, we meet the fears we love and the love we fear.

The Garden: Excerpt from full length show “The Garden”. “The Garden” is an original queer, surrealist opera conceived by Walken Schweigert and created by Open Flame Theatre. The culture of capitalism attempts to control nature in order to utilize it. “The Garden” investigates white-supremacist and colonizer culture’s desire to beautify, manage and control nature (which, of course, includes people) and reveals the horror that ensues when it does. For our all-transgender/GNC ensemble, this performance is a ritual act to reclaim all the parts of ourselves we are told are shameful and monstrous. The heart of this performance asks: how do you uproot oppression? This question is a journey; one that begins with looking at how internalized transphobia manifests in us as individuals, and in our communities.

Rosa Cuchillo: A rite of purification, cleaning and flourishing in the traditional way of some peoples of the Andes of Peru. It is the story of a cause of love.

Rosa Cuchillo is the mother who searches beyond death for her missing son, touring the other worlds (the World Below “Uqhu Pacha” and the World Above “Hanaq Pacha”). His return to this land (the “Kay Pacha”) seeks to harmonize life and through dance, help people lose their fear and begin to heal from oblivion.

The performance was created to be shown in Andean Markets in the interior of the country. “Rosa Cuchillo” bursts into the daily lives of the residents, perched on a small table in the middle of the market stalls and surprises them in a dialogue with theatricality through fable, dance, ritual, the concrete, the dreamlike, image and music, seeking to remove memory to generate a new look at the history lived in the last 20 years of the 20th century in Peru.

Ryotatio: A flowering anthology of the Internet, censorship and feminism from the 90s to today through my Yaoi fangirl alter-ego.

Something Else: Boxed in by beliefs, society, and the self- do we create these boxes or do they create us? We follow Lucy (an incarcerated Native American woman on death row). Leading up to her final moments, she discusses a range of topics from from love, to erasure.

Specter of Sunlight//: For the lightworkers, the airwalkers, and the waymakers. For the water weavers, the fire breathers, and the earth dwellers. Specter of Sunlight// unfolds as an embodied conversation between the women who founded the Black Lives Matter and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Centering the power of sisterhood as a liberatory ritual, Specter of Sunlight// honors generations activists, educators, and artists who have dedicated their lives to global movement for liberation and justice.

Symposia with the Anishinaabe Theater Exchange: The Anishinaabe Theater Exchange will discuss their current work in progress “How We Go Missing” which dives into the plethora of ways Native people (specifically women) go missing in today’s world. Part of this discussion will be about Native American dramaturgy and possible excerpts from How We Go Missing.

No Doctor for the Dead: an intimate performance based on the texts of the Norwegian poet Georg Johannesen, featuring actor Geddy Aniksdal and musician Anette Röde Hagnell. The performance highlights Georg Johannesen’s poetic texts and enhances them with music and choreography, in a bold and expressive style. These are poems with a particular sensitivity to political and historical and social questions relating to war, peace, violence, destruction and death. They often deal with themes that are considered un-poetic; distance, detachment, and the absence of emotion.

No Doctor for the Dead is supported by DTS (PAHN) and UD (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs).