What art is essential right now? Hannah Grace Morrison on Guillermo Gómez Peña & Awilda Rodríguez Lora

For many performance artists, "Zoomlandia" became a new virtual art space connecting square faces across time and borders in order to share poems, body expressions, and musical creations. Many of the participants find themselves in their home spaces for all sorts of things now: work, school, family zoom birthday parties, homework time, poetry writing, painting, eating, conference attending, and more. Thus, what do we do when our creative space becomes polluted by all of our other living experiences? The ones that we don’t want in our poems? The ones that we don’t want being mixed into the paint going onto our canvases? Where will we find a safe place for ourselves?

As an Ohio State graduate student in this pandemic, I have lost most of my safe creative, personal spaces. I am in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in Latin American literature and culture studies. I am also engaged in the Latinx Studies program and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program. The interdisciplinarity of all of these fields have been essential in my understanding of my own artistic performance and my gender expression and identity. Slam poetry and performance through the body are fundamental creative elements for my work that interlace my academic world and my ability to create new imaginaries. Without these safe spaces, I have felt heavy from the overwhelming loss of creative and collaborative possibilities.

In February of this year, I had the opportunity to view Guillermo Gómez Peña's WE ARE ALL ALIENS. In this performance, he reflected upon the distress the pandemic created for artists. His artistic distress never was disconnected from his activism for humanity. He achieved this connection through his politically provocative elaboration of the problems in the US through the use of infamous, conservative, MAGA verbiage. His call to radical democracy and radical citizenship referred us to the borders. These borders are both material and ideological. They are power structures, and they are social assumptions. They are white supremacy, and they are policing. His performance situated us across our virtually connecting lines to face the political and social realities of pandemic anti-Black, anti-brown, anti-Asian American with clear visions for solidarity through allyship and reconciliation.

As he performed his activism, he described his need for social interaction and creation beyond the virtual scrapbook of faces, longing for an in-person collaborative piecing together of existence and resistance. A  few days later, though, I was able to participate in the virtual Pocha Nostra performance pedagogy workshop led by Gómez Peña and Saúl García-López. This workshop was an essential taking back of space for me. As we took objects that sat around us in our home-office, living room, creation station and began experimenting with performance and interactions with the space and objects, we developed narratives. We revived the room as we took back our creative powers and revealed them to our virtual peers. During this epoch of Zoomlandia which has disrupted collaborative participation and community building, we stared at one another and found ways to speak through our hands and through our cheeks and through our eyebrows through our screens. We were inspired and we were inspiring.

I continued to be inspired this semester when I had the opportunity to interact with La Performera Awilda Rodríguez Lora through Zoom for my Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies class with Dr. Guisela Latorre. Similar to Gómez-Peña, Rodríguez Lora’s performance and her activism were inseparable entities as her body addresses both historical traumas and future imaginaries of the body. During our class, Rodríguez Lora spoke about how her performance provokes new meanings out of old, rigid understandings of body and movement. Her daily practice called #bailartodoslosdías [#dancingeveryday] spoke to this daily resistance and to the taking back of space through dance. In the project, she has documented herself dancing each day since she started this initiative in 2015. She spoke vulnerably to us about how her physical body was no longer seen in the same way as when she was a younger dancer. Nevertheless, her practice celebrates the uniqueness of that body every day. In this act of resistance, dance is her healing practice, her self-validation and gratification of creative expression and the power that she takes back with it.

As we continue maneuvering through the desolate land of moving screens and muted mics, we can ground ourselves by walking through our room with our eyes closed. We are grounded as we feel around and refind ourselves on the walls, in the curtains, under the desk. We take back the background in our Zoom square. Or we may look deeply into the eyes of our fellow Zoom folks and remember our daily call to create radical spaces of vulnerability and community. Performance can ground us in a creativity that is found exactly where we are. Our bodies are the foundations of creative power and the manifestation of this power is deployed for healing and celebration.

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Hannah Grace Morrison is a graduate student at Ohio State in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Morrison critically engages in Latin American literature and culture studies, Latinx Studies, and Woman, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Performance art, painting, poetry are also practices that are a part of their critical work. They are currently developing an analysis of gender performance and disidentification of the fighters known as Los Exóticos in Lucha Libre Mexicana and also has worked with social media representation and marketing of Mitú on Snapchat. Morrison considers radical safety and love as essential baselines for their work. They work to write, teach, and dialogue in a way that supports vulnerability and intentionality that leads to coalition and community building.