Luciana Achugar Will Perform PURO TEATRO at The Chocolate Factory Theater

The Chocolate Factory Theater presents the world premiere of PURO TEATRO: a Spell for Utopia, a new performance by choreographer/performer luciana achugar, co-commissioned with NYU Skirball Center For The Performing Arts and Portland Institute For Contemporary Art (PICA). Performances run November 11-13, 2021. Tickets are $20 and may be purchased in advance at (212) 352-3101 or www.chocolatefactorytheater.org.

PURO TEATRO: A Spell for Utopia furthers luciana achugar's mission of making work as a practice of constructing a new theater - a utopian theater - as a practice of growing a collective utopian uncivilized body with the audience. It asks our bodies directly, intimately and collectively: what do we need now, and what can carry us through and give us hope? PURO TEATRO: A Spell For Utopia considers the possibility of the theater inherent in the intimacy of our own experience within the spaces of our bodies, our homes and our communities. A theater without theater. An embodying spell. An intimate incantation for our dystopian reality.

The project began its life in September 2020 via Instagram (@puro_teatro_a_spellfor_utopia) as a series of invitations to the public to construct their own "theaters" within their homes or public spaces; and to respond to a series of artistic prompts within those personal containers. This phase of the work culminated in a collective outdoor performance by socially distanced audience members in Portland Oregon, presented by PICA as part of the TBA Festival.

PURO TEATRO: A Spell for Utopia will now conjure its own "theater within a theater" - in this case, The Chocolate Factory's new permanent home in Long Island City - transforming a raw industrial space into a lush immersive safe space that invites us to notice and celebrate our own sensorial experience; an inclusive body positive space that feels welcoming and accepting as it slowly transforms the space through language, sound and movement like stepping through a portal into a new empowered liberated embodied state.

Conceived and Directed by luciana achugar. Created and Performed by luciana achugar, Molly Lieber, Antonio Ramos and Sarah White-Ayón. Music by Efraín Rozas. Lighting Design by Madeline Best.

luciana achugar is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the NY and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. She has been making work in NYC and Uruguay independently and collaboratively since 1999. Her work is concerned with the post-colonial world, searching for an undoing of current power structures from the inside out. She is a two-time "Bessie" Award recipient, and was nominated for Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love (2016). She has received many accolades such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, MAP Funds, Jerome Foundation, 2017 Alpert Award and NYFA Artist Grants amongst other accolades. She was one of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch" in 2012 and her Bessie Award winning work PURO DESEO was named one of 2010 TimeOUT NY's "Best of Dance". The Pleasure Project, an ongoing space intervention project, has been seen since 2014 in NYC as guerrilla performance and through LMCC's Paths to Pier 42 Program, at Le Mouvement-Performing the City Festival in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, the American Realness Festival in NYC and at the Seattle Art Fair. She received the 2015 Austin Critic's Award for Best Touring work for OTRO TEATRO, after being presented at the Fusebox Festival, and having premiered in 2014 at the Walker Art Center and NYLA. Her previous work "Brujx" premiered in October 2018 at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts during the Karl Marx Festival and toured to Hamburg for the HALLO: Festspiele in May 2019.

This project is supported in part through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, Con Edison's Arts Al Fresco series, and the Harkness Foundation for Dance.