MOTHER/MOTHER

Cumbia 2009, Teatro Iati, Valeria, Valentina, Enrique, Karla, Olaya Florez Family


The Green Inchworm 2008, Long Island Library, Olaya Florez Family


Una danza para el vientre, NY 2004


Ensayo para Colombina para el Perine, Bogota Colombia, 1999

MOTHER/MOTHER Exhibition at AIR GALLERY www.airgallery.com
I believe that dance offers the possibility for each body to realize its expressive capacity in every moment of our daily lives. In 1999 while I was living in Bogota, Colombia as a dancer and choreographer, I started my journey into pregnancy. In the first three months I still continued to perform contemporary pieces; in the following months I choreographed a piece in a non-conventional space: a street intersection where the light posts were connected with hardwire from where the dancers hung to move. This piece was inspired by my husband’s idea of walking in the air and being transported by aerial tunnels. The piece was entitled: Aerovias or Airways. Interesting enough, at this moment I still continue to find associations between this piece and my pregnancy period.

Later in my gestation I was able to materialize my long held perception: dance has a possibility for each body. I called on four other pregnant women whose pregnancy time were similar to mine. The basic idea was to put on stage a non-repeatable performance where pregnant women could express their feelings and concerns. We created the choreographic movements, made most of the music and produced multimedia items in a piece that I entitled: “Colombina para el Perine“, “A Lollipop for the Perineum“. The piece was performed three times during our last month of pregnancy, and each of the five fathers participated in different ways.

The setting for the piece had the audience entering the theater through an installation that tried to mimic an uterus, using plastic stripes hanging from the ceiling. Photographs of the five pregnant women taken during these final months, both at home and rehearsals, were posted on the plastic stripes.

Four years later when I was already living in NYC, I tried to create a similar piece but I only found one pregnant dancer after a hard search. Instead, I ended up performing a small piece inspired in middle eastern dance movements that also served as a photograph session for a visual artist working on a project about pregnant women.

After my two pregnancies I mainly focused my work as an artist with children. I have also expanded my creative range by writing children’s books and creating performances based on children’s stories, many from Colombian folk. The result is a storytelling performance that combines dance and music.

This work allowed me to further involve all my family, adjusting to my new life as a parent, finding that it was a great way to get them involved in my artistic projects while making the movements and the staging more attractive and fun for the little audience. Some of the performances are presented as a Performing Family, with my two daughters as dancers (now 9 and 5 years old) and my husband, traveling to different places to show my work nowadays as a dancer storyteller.