Prep School: Brujx

luciana achugar (yes, the lowercase is intentional!) is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay whose work is concerned with pleasure in many forms and to many ends. In addition to the bio on her website, she also shares a mission statement in lieu of what’s more commonly called an artist’s statement – indicative of her approach to making art:

I make work as a practice of growing a new body. An uncivilized body, a decolonized body, a utopian body.

I make work as a practice of building a new theater, another/other theater, OTRO TEATRO, a utopian theater.

I make dances with a desire and rage called UTOPIA.

I make work from the rage of being a LatinAmerican living in the belly of the Empire in a post-colonial world.

I make work as a practice of growing as one would grow a plant.

I make work as a practice of growing… of growing a body of work; a practice of growing a collective body with all the participants including the audience, and of growing myself a new body; a utopian body, a sensational body, a connected body, an anarchic body… that is filled with pleasure, with love and magic.

I make work with a practice of being in pleasure. A practice of being in pleasure with a brain that melted down to the skin, the flesh, the bones, the guts, the sex, and with eyes that see without naming, they see without knowing.

I make work with a desire to escape the oppression of the arrow of time; to arrive at a place of beyond time, Body time… In Marissa Perel’s words when writing about OTRO TEATRO (2014): “But then to think about time differently. To go toward the slippage from one kind of time into another. OTRO TEATRO was three hours long, but it felt to me like no time. It was ritual time. It was a suspension of that other time, the schedule. […] It was an experience of another time with other bodies, it was an experience of a space that held all the bodies, and it was also a mass revolt. It was our task to be in this together, to allow ourselves to be overcome and to surrender to sensation.”

Brujx is a new work, commissioned for NYU Skirball’s On Your Marx festival. The title is a gender-neutral take on bruja, the Spanish word for witch. Learn more about it in NYU Professor Laura Juliana Torres-Rodríguez’s Indefinite Article.