Miguel Gutierrez Brings New Work to The Chocolate Factory Theater

The Chocolate Factory Theater (www.chocolatefactorytheater.org) continues its Thirteenth Anniversary season with the premiere of This Bridge Called My A**, a new performance by Miguel Gutierrez, presented as part of American Realness. Tickets are $20 and may be purchased in advance at (212) 352-3101 or www.chocolatefactorytheater.org.

In This Bridge Called My A** - Gutierrez's first New York premiere in four years - six Latinx performers (Alvaro Gonzalez, John Gutierrez, Miguel Gutierrez, Xandra Ibarra, Nibia Pastrana Santiago, and Evelyn Sanchez Narvaez) map an elusive choreography of obsessive and perverse action within an unstable terrain of bodies, materials and sound. A formal logic binds the group and propels them to create a constantly transforming world where their togetherness retains autonomy to complicate the idea of identity.

Clichéd Latin-American songs and the form of the telenovela are exploited to show how familiar structures contain absurdity that reveal and celebrate difference.The title is a play on This Bridge Called My Back (ed. Cherrie Morága and Gloria Anzaldua), a seminal 1981 anthology of Third Wave feminist essays that explores identity and critiques white feminism. Its calls for intersectional awareness and political resistance eerily resonate to our time now and also reveal the limitations of discourse to imagine new ways of being together.

"I am interested in how abstraction and content are set in opposition to each other in U.S. dance, and how my identity as a queer Latino artist working in overwhelmingly white contexts locates me as a bridge between these oppositions. Can a dance performance with an all brown cast re-formulate this binary?"

"I am drawn to the metaphor of the bridge - how it unites distinct spaces. My experience as a queer, bicultural, multi-lingual, first generation immigrant, and as an interdisciplinary artist who has worked for over 25 years in disparate places such as San Francisco, New York, Latin America and Europe, has always been about being this bridge - between languages, cultures, generations and disciplines. What are the particular benefits and challenges of this perspective, this ability to connect across divides, without ever fully arriving on either side?"

Created by Miguel Gutierrez. Performed by Alvaro Gonzalez, John Gutierrez, Miguel Gutierrez, Xandra Ibarra, Nibia Pastrana Santiago, and Evelyn Sanchez Narvaez. Dramaturg: Stephanie Acosta. Lighting Design: Tuçe Yasak. Costume Consultation: Santiago Venegas. Prop Design and Construction: Matt Shalzi.This Bridge Called My A** is co-commissioned by the Chocolate Factory Theater, Centre National du Danse in Pantin and Montpellier Danse.