UNBOUND was just awarded the National Theater Project Grant!
Artistic Director/Choreographer: Sarah Hogland Gurulé
Collaborating Artists: Gabriel Carrion-Gonzales & Lupita Salazar
Southwest Impact Producer: Angel Guanajuato
Work sample filmed by Francois Achan in Northern New Mexico, edited by Sarah Hogland Gurulé.
UNBOUND is a performance ritual and community-powered project that is re-membering the suppressed stories and legacies of Native people of many tribes, often women and children, who were captured and forced into slave labor by spanish colonizers in the present-day US Southwest. The director Sarah Hogland-Gurulé and collaborating artists Lupita Salazar and Gabriel Carrion-Gonzales are all descendants of enslaved Native people, often called Genízaros. Through historical research, family stories, platicas or conversations with other descendants, memory, and embodied research - the act of listening and responding to knowledge that is transmuted through the body with movement, the artists are weaving together an offering to their ancestors and their communities that lovingly and respectfully shows that their histories cannot be erased while the memories and lifeforce of their ancestors live on in their descendants and in the lands they come from.
“This is a community powered project that places great care in connecting with, learning from and healing alongside other Genízaro descendants across present day NM. This process is central to UNBOUND. Our performance ritual is the medicinal herb that grows from these rich seeds.”
To Our Ancestors:
Slowly, respectfully, we re-member the stories, lives, and legacies of our ancestors who were captured and enslaved and feel the strength of their spirits that live on in their descendants and in the lands they come from. We send them gratitude and honor how their presence weaves into the performance ritual and community-powered project we are calling UNBOUND.
About Sarah:
Sarah Hogland-Gurulé is a mixed Xicana dance artist and educator from land traditionally stewarded by the Tiwa, also known as Albuquerque, NM. She is guided by the belief that dance is a form of embodied healing, remembrance and visioning. She is a core artist with Dancing Earth, and has performed with MALACARNE, Pat Graney Company and CHERDONNA (Seattle, WA), Lawine Torrèn (Austria) and Yeztli Danza y Arte (Albuquerque, NM). Her solo work has been presented by the American Dance Festival’s Emerging Choreographer’s Showcase, Seattle’s People of Color Salon and the University of New Mexico. She is also deeply devoted to sharing the joys and medicine of movement with others. She currently teaches dance at the Institute for American Indian Arts and has shared dance in many spaces, including after school programs, youth detention facilities, pre-professional training studios, family shelters, universities and community centers.
About Gabriel:
Gabriel Carrion-Gonzales (he/they) continues to be inspired by Marie Carrion-Mcafee, his fearless mother who demonstrates self-love, boundary-setting, and speaking from an authentic heart. As a dance artist and arts administrator, Gabriel is interested in being a connector of two worlds; one in his head/dream space and this physical realm we co-inhabit.
Gabriel is currently on the leadership team of Dancing Earth as an Executive Producer for the CALIFA project. While on an ongoing basis, developing a relationship with the Queer Community of Albuquerque to lead Queering ABQ, a project Gabriel is founding and developing. This project calls on Queer elders, Queer community, and Queer youth to speak authentically and find the power within the community to play a part in advancing Queer culture which currently holds the potential to damage many Queer-Trans BIPOC lives in the Southwest and beyond.
On a human level, I am a Queer Burqueno Latinx artist committed to improving the culture our current youth and the next generations will grow up in. I am committed to fulfilling my duties of being a future Queer elder and committed to walking in Love while I roam this beautiful Earth.
About Lupita:
Lupita is a farmer and a de vez en cuando artist from northern New Mexico. She has been educated by the universities, lands, and elders of southern California, Chile, northern Arizona, and New Mexico. As a performer with Dancing Earth, she has been able to share her land based knowledge in the universal language of dance. She continues to farm on her family's land, and share what she knows with the next generation.
About Angel:
Angel Guanajuato is a New Mexico-based artist who focuses on exploring his identity and human emotion from the perspective of a queer existentialist through music, poetry, and dance. Angel’s practice is a spiritual ritual and portal for accessing love, wisdom, inspiration, electricity, and personal self-actualization. His music is currently exploring these ideas and feelings in modern/electronic compositions and arrangements.
As Co-Director of Commnuity Research & Engagement, New Mexico, for Museum of Dance Angel has co-created an Artists’ Cyclical Mentorship Program that was recently awarded the Collaborative Impact Grant through the Santa Fe Arts & Culture Department.
As Southwest Community Impact Producer Angel strives to support the mission of Dancing Earth while creatively producing events and programming (Summer Institute & Unbound) and holding intentions of relationship first, reciprocity, and radical self-expression.
Land Acknowledgement: Dancing Earth respectively creates and lives with the lands traditionally stewarded by the Tiwa and Tewa Pueblo people.
The National Theater Project is made possible with lead funding from the Mellon Foundation and additional support from the Doris Duke Foundation.
A special thank you to our Residency Collaborators at The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), The National Hispanic Cultural Center (NHCC), Alessandra Ogen and Peñasco Theater.
Follow our instagram @unbound.lineage to witness the unraveling of these stories, the process of moving through each unspoken word, and the offerings that emerge as a result.
All photos above were taken by Randi Lynn Beach, more work found on her website.