SHOWS

Memorial Gestures: Mourning and Yearning at the Rotonda

Presented by Ernesto Pujol

October 07, 2007 — October 08, 2007
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 Read FNews Magazine article

Learn more about Ernesto Pujol