MAroma

Video documentation of Puerto Rican experimental dance performance 'mAroma, ' choreographed by Viveca Vázquez, who is a choreographer, dancer, and a professor of humanities and contemporary dance for actors at the University of Puerto Rico. She presented her first work with Pisotón, the first experimental dance group of Puerto Rico and, shortly after, Taller de Otra Cosa, of which she became the first director. Through the company she presented her choreographic work and produced events such as 'Rompeforma' a key festival in the development of the experimental dance and performance scene in Puerto Rico, which was co-produced with Puerto Rican choreographer based in the U.S. Merian Soto. Since 1984 she has produced and performed experimental dance works in the United States, Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina, among a great number of other places. As a teacher she has developed a pedagogical model based on body conscience and improvisation. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

'MAroma' is a stage adaptation based on Virgil's The Aeneid, Pasolini's Mamma Roma, and Tollinchis' Rome's Metamorphosis. The Aeneid is the poem for Augustus' Imperial Rome's foundation. Circa 29 BC, Virgil was the best poet in the city and Augustus was victorious after a long war period. Augustus entrusted Virgil to write the poem of his glory. Three books are central in the this epic poem, IV and V, where the narration presents the love between Dido, Queen of Carthage and Aeneas; and book VI, where Aeneas goes to the Avernus to meet his father Anquises' shadow. mAroma adapts these books and adds a new viewpoint by using Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma. As Mara Negrón points out in the playbill for the staging of this piece in March and April 2006, 'mAroma navigates through the fragments of these stories without intending a lineal narration of the episodes. The characters circulate in a city without an identity -- it can be any city, any street in the world. Rome is not Rome, but a place of transit, riddled with encounters and misunderstandings, where the characters visit their own desires' shadows, where the characters turn somersaults ('hacen maromas') in-between their past and their present. And at the same time, Rome is always Rome -- a place inhabited by its past. The characters of mAroma are yesterday and are today.' In giving bodies to these characters, the performers insert themselves in the continuous dialogue between history and present, and the embodiment of that relationship on stage. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics