Memorial Gestures: Mourning and Yearning at the Rotonda
Presented by Ernesto Pujol
Sunday, October 07
10:00 AM — 10:00 PM
Chicago Cultural Center
FREE
Sixteen performers choreographed by Ernesto Pujol embodied a sense of individual and communal loss, publicly sustaining the act of mourning for 12 uninterrupted hours, between 10:00 AM and 10:00 PM on October 10, 2007. They sat, stood, gestured, and moved silently through space, from darkness to light, embodying a geometry of loss as “chess pieces” of ongoing unfulfilled longings. The Rotunda’s grided floor design served both as labyrinth (a focused journey) and a maze (with variations), providing their bodies with psychological routes through an archetypal, unspoken narrative of mourning, with no particular destination other than yearning; a route that sought to evoke absence through presence.
This project was co-sponsored by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Chicago Performance Network. It inaugurated the new IN>TIME performance art series at the Chicago Cultural Center, and was produced by Claire Sutton, and co-curated by performers Sara Schnadt and Mark Jeffery. Performer Trevor Martin acted as SAIC link. Artist Blaine Anderson acted as early Project Assistant in the Portland workshop, and in New York. Artist Janine Antoni generously donated some of the women’s dresses from her archive. All images by Peter Coombs.
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