Maria Mercedes Flores Mujica & Kollaborateur*innen

La Vacabose happens when the party ends in overindulgence. Between ecstasy, excess, drunkenness, and slowness, the performers go through diverse states of being. They create a space to celebrate, to retreat, to unfold and to transform, once and again and again. The sound of the Venezuelan folk dance Joropo lets landscapes of the Savannah, and their inhabitants appear.The space shifts into street parties where people, cows, demons, and goddesses dance all together. To heal and celebrate femininity, Maria Mercedes Flores Mujica breaks with the traditionally gendered couple dance. Inspired by Venezuelan folk festivals, healing rituals, and Egyptian mythology the choreography becomes a way of resistance against patriarchy and capitalism.

Maria Mercedes Flores Mujica is a syncretic inter(un)disciplinary Venezuelan dance artist based in Cologne. Questioning cultural hierarchies and knowledge production and reception nowadays, her works explore the intersections between trans- & hyper-culturalism, time/space displacement, and experienced corporealities through the research of folk dances and music. Explorations of auditive, visual, and tactile rhythm allow her to create communication forms to bridge interaction within performers, audience, and space. With empowerment-oriented, pleasure driven body practices, aesthetics of the informal, and collage as a compositional practice she creates performative ecosystems that bloom on the stage and beyond. To deepen her artistic research she received in 2024 the NRW Tanzrecherche grant and became an 8-month resident of the K3 Choreographic Center in Hamburg.

Accompanying programme