NAIA URRESTI

DANCER
CHOREOGRAPHER

 

October 11 - 19:30

October 12 - 17:00, 19:30

LCG  (Luisa Catucci Gallery) ARTLAB- Allerstraße 38 

10-20E Sliding Scale (free drink ticket over 15E) - tickets available on EventBrite

How can we understand intimacy in a way that allows us to capture it? Intimacy is about authenticity, getting as close as possible to our truest selves. You Are Safe Here is more than just an artistic exploration of intimacy, it is a manifestation of the experience itself. Each artist involved contributes their voice, vulnerability, and authentic self-expression to create a holistic experience for everyone walking through the door. This hybrid gallery and performance event will invite you into a space where you can feel safe to let down your guard and connect through visual art, interactive photo projects, and performances. Be drawn in through all of your senses. This space is far from a cold white wall gallery, but a space set up to allow for warmth both physically and emotionally. We hope our radical honesty can emanate beyond the stage and create a communal environment, drawing our audience to feel equally safe, seen, and validated in their authentic expressions.

 

 

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October 24/25/26 - 20H
Brotfabrik Berlin
Caligariplatz 1, 13086
Berlin, Germany

The house where we grew up, the house where we can be vulnerable, where we're intimate, or the house that we choose to build away from our country. How are we shaped by the roles and expectations that we learned according to our gender, what does it mean to have been born a man, or a woman? How does this affect us and our relationships? How can we understand intimacy in a way that allow us to capture it? Where do our boundaries lie, and what happens when we remove our layers and share our most personal and intimate selves with friends and strangers alike? What happens when we cannot express ourselves because we have not yet mastered the language of the place we've choose to live? What are the emotional and physical challenges of adapting to a new culture, what place does our tongue has in all of this? 
Three dance performances, each answering some of this questions. 
-E: by Naia Urresti and Dionel Pire.
-In our clubhaus: by Laura DeAngelis and Armonia Stamataki.
-Lengua [in]quieta (rest[less] tonge): by Isadora Pacheco and Pascal Schuk.

https://www.brotfabrik-berlin.de/buehne-programm-aktueller-monat/

Naia Urresti is a neurodivergent Venezuelan dancer and choreographer based in Berlin. From a really young age she starts her investigation of the body and performing arts through artistic gymnasts and theatre, studying acting in the Centre of Artistic Creation T.E.T. and taking part in diverse theatre workshops with Maria Fernanda Ferro, Diana Peñalver, among others. She worked as an actress in different professional projects such as La Ola, Jack y las Habichuelas Mágicas, La Princesa y el Dragón and La Leyenda de Robin Hood with the Theatre Group Skena; and The Importance of being Ernest with Amentia Teatro. She also started her labour as an educator guiding theatre workshops in schools with the company Skena. Later on she continued her education in Contemporary Dance, Modern Dance, Flying Low and Passing Through, Ballet, Improvisation, Release Technique and Contact Improvisation with different institutions in Caracas, such as Taller Experimental de Danza Pisorrojo, Taller de Danza de Caracas and UNEARTE, and having among her teachers Susan Bello, Evelyn Pérez, Cristina Gallardo, Ricardo Rodríguez, Inés Rojas y Carlos Penso. Having professionally dance with diverse venezuelan dance companies such as Pisorrojo (Nepente, The Nutcracker, Fértil, Tesela, Pilastra, Seis Ecos), Neodanza (Azar, Festival de Improvisación Día 13, El Boquete, Furor Navideño), Sieteocho (Análogo) and Proyecto Movimiento (O: Una Mirada a Oriente desde Occidente), she continued her investigation in Europe taking workshops with David Zambrano, Humanhood, Sharon Friedman, Siciliano Contemporary Ballet, Tomi Paasonen, Descalzhina Danza and taking part of the EBB Junior Company. Once in Germany, she starts her investigation as a choreographer developing solo pieces, among them Buscando (2020), 1990 (2021), Penelope (2022), Crescent (2023) and E (2024), and presentig her projects in different spaces in Berlin and Europe. She's also a funding member of the collective The ထth Space, which was awarded with a residency in Ausland Berlin, and will develop an interdisciplinary project about Autistic Masking in December of 2024.

CHOREOGRAPHIC PROJECTS

E
 

This is a duo dance piece of two queer immigrants born and raised in Venezuela, a country that is deeply homophobic and without any legislation that protects the LGBTQ+ community. A country with a very conservative and sexist society, with strict gender roles and expectations, where we fought to find space for our own ways of expression, identity, freedom and safety. This in the context of a complex political situation and humanitarian crisis, where it seemed irrelevant to talk about the rights of minorities when the whole population had been suffering for so long. Being outside, we take the responsibility of starting a discussion around this problematic by showing our intimate perspective of what gender roles represent for us, how they have shaped us, and the inner and outer violence that comes with the reality of being born different. We question ourselves, what does it mean to be born a man? What does it mean to be born a woman? How do we have to behave, how do we have to move, how do we have to look like? Which roles are we supposed to fulfill? How do these roles affect the way that we relate to each other, how do they shape our intimacy? How are our beings and our personalities conditioned, sometimes limited, because we’re born one way or the other? Could it be different? What would we be if we hadn’t been raised in the mold of gender? Would we be more free, more authentic? Would we relate to each other differently, would or relationships change, would we be more vulnerable, more intimate? What is the punishment if we don’t follow these rules, and how are we conditioned by concepts as sin or guilt, when it comes to our self expression? This questions are the motor to the creation of this piece. Using the gestures, the movement of the arms, the legs, the way we walk, we sit, we move, we interact. Working in duo and solo, we’ll try, if not to answer, at least to reflect over these questions, giving our own perspective from our experience, as one man, one woman.

Choreography and Performance by Naia Urresti and Dionel Pire. Original Music by Nuwanliss. Photos by Manuel Kinzer.

CRESCENT

A piece that talks about anger, about the fear of losing control, the fear of losing power, and how we as women restrain ourselves. As women we live our whole life policed, through criticism, catcalling, harassment, abuse and rape. We are expected to be desirable and beautiful, but we are the sole responsible for male desire and its consequences towards us. We are expected to enjoy our sexualities, but criticized and shamed if we do so. Our value is determined by the number of sexual partners we have, but we are lame and prudes if we don't have any. Where lies our power, when we are seen, and encouraged to see ourselves, never as subjects but as objects whose main value is the desire they inspire, but loose once we give our bodies to someone, as merely merch?

Choreography and Performance by Naia Urresti. Original Music by La Infanta de Bernardino. Photos by Laura DeAngelis and Steffen Wollmann.

Performed in Brotfabrik (Berlin, Germany), Festival Moving Poets Be Fe:male by Tanz Tangente (Berlin, Germany) and Bande á Part (Berlin, Germany).

PENELOPE

Penelope is a dance solo that speaks about female desire. Connecting different scenes, each one representing different aspects of romantic relationships between women, starts a reflexion about the mandates that romantic love imposes on women, not only in heteronormative relations but in every bond we have. The waiting, the desire and the dissatisfaction of this desire, the unrest, the pleasure, the abandon and the disappointment form part of this journey that we make when we expose ourselves, many times without taking care of us, when we liaise with one another. The performer weaves and unweaves herself waiting, constructing, without getting to an end, and getting trapped in the expectation and ideal of the relationships.

Choreography and Direction by Naia Urresti. Music By La Infanta de Bernardino. Photos by Luca Fiorella, Anna Wider and Henryk Weiffenbach.

Performed in Theater Expedition Metropolis (Berlin, Germany), Tangente Dance Festival No. 5 (Berlin, Germany) and Bandé a Part (Berlin, Germany).

1990

A girl is born. She'll learn to behave, to adapt herself, to fit into the form that society expects from her as a woman. Not too loud, always nice. If she wants more, she'll have to prove that she's strong, that she's capable, that she's smart, that she's different. She can play, but if she trusts too much, she's in danger, and it's her fault. Her body was made to bear children, it comes at a cost if she chooses not to. Other girls were born yesterday. More will come tomorrow.

Choreography and Direction by Naia Urresti. Music By La Infanta de Bernardino.

Performed in Zukunft am Ostkreuz (Berlin, Germany), and Lake Studios (Berlin, Germany).

BUSCANDO

There was a locust whose dream was to become a mammal. She went to the best surgeons in the world and they told her that it was possible, but they would have to remove the wings. She accepted, and she became very famous as a complicated medical case, everybody was taking pictures of her and admiring this science achievement. And she was happy. But sometimes, when she was alone looking at the summer nights, she missed to fly.

Choreography and Direction by Naia Urresti. Music By La Infanta de Bernardino. Video by Rolando González.

Projected in Social Media and in the Exposition Unclaimed Identities (Berlin, Germany).

WORK AS A DANCER

EBB JUNIOR COMPANY

PROYECTO MOVIMIENTO

SIETEOCHO

NEODANZA

PISORROJO

naiabm13@gmail.com