preámbulo

How does a site choreograph us? How might we re-choreograph it—or at least allow its architecture to hold our sense of time differently?

In this two-part improvisation, spanning over both days of the festival, nibia pastrana santiago works with movement, light, sound, space, and objects gathered from around the building itself. Alongside lighting designer Migdalia Luz Barens-Vera and sound designer vaga, she inhabits EMPAC’s proscenium theater—re-choreographing the space and allowing it re-choreograph her. With tenderness toward the theater’s capacity to frame a performer’s figure before an audience, pastrana santiago persistently unsettles and dissolves the venue’s familiar infrastructure.

The work draws on an evolving archive of performance practices developed in public spaces across Puerto Rico and beyond, in which movement becomes a way of mapping her body alongside—and as—object, territory, climate, effort, and collective presence. Her title, which translates to “preamble,” holds a feeling of anticipation, incompletion, and openness to failure. It hints at both a way of being on stage and of participating in a political landscape.