The 13th Chronicle

A butoh-inspired performance, The 13th Chronicle is a response to the twelve chronicles presented in Sabes Algo de Mariana? (Do You Know Anything About Mariana? 2011), a play by Mexican scholar and dramaturg Andres Castuera-Micher about the current and ongoing problem of gender violence in Mexico. In responding to Castuera-Micher's work through a site-specific performance that incorporates dance, installation, song, ritual, puppetry and moving sculpture, and that seeks to involve the audience as active witnesses to its processual unfolding, a significant aspect of my work attends to how we are all implicated in the normalized violence happening next door, across the street, and in our homes and places of work. We mainly choose not to hear, see, or speak about this matter, but we are both complicit in and victims of the political systems of normalization that have historically subdued women's bodies under the systems of patriarchy and colonialism. Asking how performance might be used as a tool for personal and political change, I draw on Victor Turner's concept of "social drama" to consider how the performative dimensions of ritual might be mobilized to transform individual and collective consciousness. In this way, I posit The 13th Chronicle as a poetic offering to reimagine the world, and specifically the social processes that must be implemented to break the painful and horrible cycle of gender violence that is endemic not just to Mexico, but to all parts of the globe.