Performance

Having attended Polina Porras Sivolobova’s Performance Art workshop and spent many long hours in the studio and the Library studying the art and practicing, ‘Monsanto and the Milpa, the Milpa and Monsanto’ was birthed, a 20 minute solo performance exploring the subject and characters that pervade the corn debate in Mexico.  This included the dance and song of the character of the mother of maize, the women that that stand for the grassroots; growing, preparing and cooking corn in the milpas, walking through the generations of corn based culture in Mexico. The other character arrived on the stage holding a potentially transgenic corn (from a friends garden in San Augustin), a money bearing monster ‘the threat’, a coercive friend. The stage became a map of thought and concepts, from ‘the solution series’ of my drawings to a time line of industrialisation and how this threatens local trade, the performance ended with the destruction of industrially produced products in a cloud of dust, centre stage. Thanks to all that came to see it. Thanks to my fellow performers and to Polina for supporting this huge step for me in making performance art.   

To see more images from Roses performance and the rest of the evening, see our facebook page. 

Rose Arbuthnott