Awilda Rodríguez Lora doesn’t feel strange being strange

Dancer, director of La Rosario Proyectos, yoga practitioner — these are just three of Awilda Rodríguez Lora’s countless, shapeshifting forms. Born in Mexico, raised in Puerto Rico, and working across the Americas and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Rodríguez Lora's lifelong practice is defined by its movement — bodily movement, political movement, and moving the field of experimental performance forward with every step. To learn more about Rodríguez Lora and La Rosario Proyectos — a creative project fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas — keep reading or listening.

VICKY BLUME: If your younger self saw you today, what do you think would surprise or inspire you most about your creative practice?

AWILDA RODRÍGUEZ LORA: Well, first and foremost that I'm still dancing and performing at 47 years old. When I started dancing, there was this myth that a dancer stops dancing at around 20, 30 years old. To still be dancing, improvising, doing experimental work, supporting experimental work — that's surprising to me. Starting out, I was mostly doing television. I wanted to dance with Madonna, and that industry really highlights younger and skinnier bodies. So for me to be an older dancer, bigger, darker skinned — for me, it's still quite impressive. At this point I love myself, but my younger self was trying to lose weight to impress other people. I never saw myself reflected in dance videos or dance history books so when I turned twenty, I essentially retired because I couldn’t put up with trying to be this skinny dancer anymore. That’s when I told myself, “I'll do something else.” It inspired me to create spaces for other dancers that look like me, dancers who are proposing different ways of how you can look, be, and do dance and performance. I think my younger self would be super impressed. When I teach students, seeing them, seeing me — it's eye-opening to see more possibilities opening up that I didn't have when I was younger. It reminds me of all the beautiful mentors along the way that encouraged me to keep on dancing. I'm here thanks to them.

VB: And you're continuing to move the field forward by expanding young people's understanding of what's possible.

ARL: Yeah. My heart is always with those emergent artists, those people that are trying something new, something there's no space for when you’re trying to redefine the form. Those are the ones that I'm attuned to, asking, “how do I create the space for you?” We need more representation of what it is to be an artist, right? Being in Puerto Rico — or any other part of the world, really — we are so diverse as a human species. There are infinite ways of accessing movement, and they all need space for us to create progressive dialogues around race, gender, ability, sexuality, class, and beyond.

VB: You identify as a choreographer, yoga practitioner, teacher and cultural manager committed to supporting exploration of alternative ways of life based on community, creativity and social justice. And of course, director of La Rosario Proyectos — a creative project fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas. Are there people in your life who model this expansive approach to community building? Artists, family members, teachers?

ARL: Definitely my parents, both of them in different ways. To me, my parents were always artists even though they didn't claim that identity. But they were always very queer. They were really pushing limits in regards to, “how do you express yourself at a family event?” My parents would always dance. They didn't care what kind of event it was. We were vegetarians all our lives, too, and didn’t drink alcohol. In Puerto Rico today, you can find almond milk anywhere, but it wasn’t always like this. It took bravery to go against the flow and stand up for their values while protecting us and caring for us. I see them in my own self — I don't feel strange being strange, you know? It's perfectly normal not to fit in with everybody else. 

Then I met Tim Miller — a performance artist, storyteller, and dancer — who became my first mentor during a residency at Links Hall in Chicago for queer emerging performance artists. All of those labels resonated with me at the time even though the word “queer” wasn’t used much in Puerto Rico back then. Tim Miller was one of several artists who lost his NEA funding for creating controversial work. He challenged the state in court and won. I decided, “I'm going to go and learn from this person.” Seeing the bravery of a queer man talking openly about HIV shifted the way I thought about artmaking. He has always promoted creating work about your own self — autobiographical work — and understanding that our stories are much more shared and intertwined than we think. Even if races or genders or sexual identities aren’t the same, there's something about existing and choosing life and how we want to be remembered. As an artist, I expose myself so we don't feel alone and I don't feel alone. 

Another mentor in experimental performance, Barak adé Soleil, taught me the value of Black artistry and how to ask for compensation in a way that is just for us and for our communities. I watched him negotiate how we got paid, how we got treated. He was all about, “Okay, let's do this. But we're going to do this right, we're going to do it openly, and we're going to take care of each other.”

Even my parents were multidisciplinary in a way. My father's a chiropractor that plays music. My mother created a whole line of vegetarian food, and worked with people as an occupational therapist. Tim, Barak, they both wore so many hats, too. So I always had that example that I don't have to be just a dancer. I don't have to be just a choreographer. I can be many things. They can all intersect and I don't have to leave any part of myself behind when I step into a room. It's a matter of surviving, too. I had to reinvent myself constantly depending on the city I was in, especially as a young, queer, confused kind of person that was just trying to do what she loves to do. Along the way, I found mentors and people to remind me, “you're on the right path.”

VB: It’s beautiful to see how that gift just keeps being passed on through your work with La Rosario Proyectos. Located in Santurce, Puerto Rico and founded in 2015, it serves as an art residency, an experimental incubation space, an exhibition venue, and a supportive community space for local and international artists. You're coming up on ten years of official existence. Can you share some of your biggest learnings from keeping a space running for almost ten years?

ARL: That idea of collectivity was definitely a big learning. La Rosario made me change my practice and move away from calling myself a soloist or thinking that I'm doing things by myself. It's always collective. It reminds me of the collective of the body itself. It functions collectively with blood, with intestines, with the brain, with cells, with so many systems — nervous, muscular, respiratory. La Rosario first started mostly as a way of sustaining my practice in Puerto Rico because I moved here and realized I didn't want to leave. I understood then, my adult moment, that my role was to be here as a body.

I started out by opening up my home as a communal creative space for living and sharing. If an artist needed a space for an exhibition, a space to live, if friends needed a rehearsal space for their theater projects, the answer was always, “yeah, use it.” Eventually, people thinking of coming back to Puerto Rico, people from across the diaspora, queer people, started coming through the space. It was like, “come through, this is a safe space, we'll figure it out where you can go next.” After Hurricane Maria, my neighbors who are activists started using the space for organizing. While the adults were doing such serious, adult stuff, I knew what to do with the kids — we’d create plays, dances. Food is also a big part of community work, so we’d often cook for 50, 100 people. I never cooked for more than ten people before that. There’s this phrase in Spanish, it sounds so beautiful: poner el cuerpo. It means “when you put your body in front.” Together, embodied, anything is possible. Everything that we've accomplished as humans. All the inventions, all the things. It's because of relationships. Of course, community isn’t all peaches and cream. It's not always super joy. But even those challenges, they create something else that needs to happen in the space.

I'm still learning about creating more collectivity, and asking for help even more. How do I remove myself in a way that lets other people be leaders of this project? Because it was happening in my home, and everybody still associates me with La Rosario. I respond, “no, La Rosario is a community that I'm working with as I learn to trust and let go and let it transform.” Who knows what it will become.

VB: It's so striking to hear you talk about La Rosario as a living, breathing thing that should be able to shift and change.

ARL: Which is quite complex when it comes to grants, funding, support, and getting asked to define things. To be honest, the biggest challenge has been to keep defining it, because I want it to be alive. I want it to transform based on the needs that a community may have. Whether it’s a performance artist community, a dance community, a theater community, a queer community, a Black community. It could become, you know, a storage space at some point. Why would I say no?

VB: Speaking of support, let’s talk about COPRÁCTICA. As I interpret it, COPRÁCTICA is a $5 per month membership offering people a way to support the sustainability of La Rosario while also receiving benefits like discounted rentals, access to tools, content, etc. Do you have any wisdom to share with artists and makers who struggle to ask for financial support? There are so many people out there who find the prospect of asking for money or help really hard.

ARL: You know what? It is really hard. The students I teach at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, they tell me about their projects, their struggles, and I'm always like, “ask for money.” Ask your uncle, ask your mom, ask your neighbor. It’s a struggle to just ask, and the ask can’t just be to cover the cost of the production. It’s about understanding your value, and just being and existing as an artist, which is very, very complex. Especially in the kind of world we live in. With Puerto Rico as a colony and the psychology of value for us as colonized bodies — it makes that way of being even more complex. The U.S. also has colonized bodies because it has gone through that history. I still don't know how to make it click for my students, because personally, I’ve always been one of those people that will write postcards to all my family members every time I move to another city. Or if I went to work for a show in Canada, I would send a postcard. Not necessarily like, “these are my mecena, my future donors or sponsors.” No, these are relationships that I need to sustain in order for me to exist because they've always been there. Even if they haven't been to a single show — we’ve shared birthdays or weddings or meals. It’s just about understanding the importance of relationships and the mutual exchange of those relationships, the feedback. We feed off each other, not in a vampire kind of way —

VB: No, in the best way.

ARL: In the best way. I’m always telling my students that, in relationships, you have to expose yourself. Which is hard and complex because not everybody is an extrovert. But we just have to keep communicating and not hide.

VB: We're coming up on the last question. Access to space and land in Puerto Rico is a heavy subject, given the long and ongoing history of colonization and occupation. Can you speak about the role of joy in running a community space on this land?

ARL: I surround myself with people that want Puerto Rico to be an independent island. To be our own nation, to be our own space that we can call ours, so we can make our own laws, make our own decisions, take care of environmental crises, take care of the economic crisis. But in order to do that, we need to be able to look at each other and ask, “what are our differences?” Open up a conversation, with all the conflict, with all the chaos, but with the goal of finding peace. And I feel that without peace, we are not going to be able to push forward whatever safe space we want to create for a whole community or whole island.

I was just having a conversation about this because of the culture of canceling, especially with social media. With it comes displacement and other ways of penalizing people, which are like, punitive strategies, right, for telling people how they're doing things wrong. Thinking of Puerto Rico in particular, since we are a “small island,” we know each other much more than maybe other spaces. We are alongside many islands and many communities that interconnect, wanted or not. Communities that we don't know. We need to trust that those people that you cross paths with are there for you to learn something. And if we're not in a space of love, you will miss the opportunity of growing together with your community. I see love as openness, love as a space. For us to decolonize ourselves, we have to love ourselves across differences. Because the colonizer intended to create those boundaries of Black, Indian, spaniard, mulatto, criollo. When we say, “I’m not going to talk to you,” we’re missing an opportunity to join forces and be stronger. It’s something I’m struggling with right now because my community has become fragmented, like a lot of other communities, because of social media communication. There's not enough talking in person and seeing those emotions, seeing the energy behind the words. There's a loss in translation way too much with visual language, with written language. It’s why the strategy of displacing us can be so effective and keep creating division.

VB: Yeah, division can keep us from moving in any direction, and we need things to move.

ARL: Movement generates movement. There's no other way of doing it. Here, we call political movements movimiento. If we want something, we need to move. We all need to move. We cannot just stay static. We have to go and talk to the other person, or move through the other’s space, or just dance by ourselves. Our bodies are in constant movement. That's the natural way of the collective to exist. Staticness is make believe, it was invented. Movement is human.

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