Maria Mercedes Flores Mujica

LA VACABOSE

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 and turns them into street parties where people, cows, demons, and goddesses dance all together. Maria Mercedes Flores Mujica breaks with the traditionally gendered couple dance to celebrate and heal the feminine. Inspired by Venezuelan folk festivals, rituals of healing, and Egyptian mythology the choreography becomes a way of resistance against the patriarchal system.

^{Artistic direction: Maria Mercedes Flores Mujica
co-creation and performance: Sebastian Varra, Darya Myasnikova
sounddesign and composition: Szymon Wójcik
dramaturgy: Rodrigo Garcia Alves, Niklaus Bein
Outside Eyes: Fa-Hsuan Chen, Claude Jansen
costume design and creation: Marie Akoury, Meret Zürcher
costume production: Meret Zürcher
Visual Identity: Monika Orpik
Light design: Sascha Görg}

Dowload the evening programme as PDF.

20% discount on the ticket price when purchasing tickets for a second TanzHochDrei festival performance, 30% discount on the ticket price when purchasing tickets for a third performance.

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)