Maria Mercedes Flores Mujica

HOW DO WE MAKE SANCTUARY?

The Research Labs are a new series of workshops for professional dancers and choreographers that complement the K3 professional training programme. Instead of short training sessions, the focus will be on in-depth methods, practices and research processes.

The first laboratory, led by resident choreographer Maria Mercedes Flores Mujica, will play with the imagination of nature and spirits, transforming them into a realm of rhythms, melodies and different physicalities. Clarity and blurriness, visibility and opacity, silence and volume, sobriety and intoxication are intended to create an inviting space in which to retreat, unfold, transform and celebrate.

Maria Mercedes Flores Mujica

is a Venezuelan dancer and choreographer living in Cologne. Before moving to Cologne to study dance at the University of Music and Dance, she studied modern languages and translation at the Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela. Since 2018 she has been creating her own work in collaboration with various and in 2024 she received the NRW KulturSekretariat Tanzrecherche scholarship. Her choreographies are based on the complexity of rhythm and its perception, and on knowledges of folk and contemporary dance, celebration, and rituals.

For her research at K3 she will be engage in an exploration of Joropo, a couple dance where gender roles are binary, and inspired by the syncretism of Venezuelan spiritism. This dance gives voice and volume to unheard cosmologies, voices silenced due to patriarchal-colonialist developments. Creating a celebratory, ritualistic and interactive environment, Maria seeks, together with the audience, to celebrate, reconnect and heal the relationship with the female voice muffled over time.

(Stand: 2024)