The Healing Power of Expression: A Journey of Trauma, Pain and Transformation

This is a powerful performance piece featuring Jorge Luis Morejon, Ph.D., who created The Healing Power of Expression in collaboration with Susan Kleinman, BC-DMT. The piece was produced by Adrienne Ressler, LMSW-CEDS at the Renfrew Center for Eating Disorders, Florida. The piece, specially choreographed for the International Association of Eating Disorders Professionals Conference (iaedp) audience, was commissioned by the Renfrew Center Foundation for Eating Disorders. The presentation was recorded by Maydelaine Rodriguez-Castillo on February 28, 2014 in St. Petersburg, Florida.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y_PpEz4ayc

Inner Loop

Jorge Luis Morejon and Sandra Portal-Andreu in the Salsa piece.  Miami Avenue Metro Mover Station, Miami. 2014

Inner Loop is as a free automatic looping downtown transportation with no driver, no beginning and no end. It is a cycle, a circle, a journey through public space encountering secrets hiding in plain view, a multi generational cast all exploring the only time we ever have.

Directed by Gabriel Forestieri and Performed by Dale Andree, Joanne Barret, Belaxis Buil, Miu Buil, Carly Dorman, Gabriel Forestieri, Jenny Larson, Joanna Mayaari-Ursal, Lucien Mayaari-Ursal, Kristen Mclaren, Jorge Luis Morejon, Rebecca Pelham, Lize-Lotte Pitlo, Sandra Portal-Andreu, Carlota Pradera, Laura Prada, Emily Tedesco, Carlos Torres, Katie Wiegman.

Also visit projectlimb.net
LINK: Projectlimb Promo - http://vimeo.com/84673853

The Moving Perspective Festival, Miami, 2014

The Moving Perspective Festival at Inkub8, a Knight Arts Grantee, is described as “a series of individually conceived weekly workshops, “labjam “sessions and intensives designed as an open dialogue to identify meanings and procedures from idea to presentation.” But what the festival represents is Inkub8′s and

its allies’ insistence that Miami become a center for cutting-edge performing arts. The final night improvisation was performed by Lazaro Godoy, Gabriel Forestieri, Tangin Fong, Jorge Luis Morejón, Carlota Pradera on Saturday evening at Inkub8, February 15th, 8pm.

Jorge Luis Morejon (left) and Gabriel Forestieri during the Moving Perspective Festival's closing improvisation.

Conference on the Sustainability of Dance as an Art Form: Economics, Politics and the Philosophy of Resistance

Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination. The University of the West Indies, 

Cave Hill Campus, Bridgetown, Barbados. March 6 - 8, 2014. 

Paper Title: Caribbean Dance: Ecology of Our Sensory Environment

Jorge Luis Morejón

Creative and Festival Arts Department

University of the West Indies,

Saint Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies

Abstract: This study considers dance ecology as a key concept in analyzing the sustainability of dance in the Caribbean. Dance can be looked at from two distant positions; from an economic stand or from a communicative, efficient and transcendental point of view. Economically, a generalized tendency is to consider dance as an ephemeral cultural manifestation with limited market value. There is also the view that dance is an art form whose value, in terms of economics, relays on the trade or sales generated around the performance event. This is, however, somewhat a myopic view of dance as art. It ignores the relationship between dance’s use value, dance’s exchange value, and dance’s inherent value as it blurs definitions of artistic individuality and artistic nonconformity as opposed to an ever increasing systematization of information. As energy and information become our most exchangeable natural resources, dance, as an art form, needs to find a relevant position within the newly emerging economic structure without resigning from its role as a container of freedom and of aesthetic and intellectual vision and pursuit. This is precisely why I argue that dance production has to be conceptualized as a model for sustaining cultural ecology as it prevents society from contaminating people’s perceptual environments. Although dance is not a standard concept in economics, there are some elements such as investment value and rates of return, which, once compared to more tangible art forms contribute to the understanding of dance beyond the quantitative impositions of formulaic art markets.

Symposium: 15TH Annual IFE-ILE Afro-Cuban Dance Festival on Traditions and Contemporaneity, Cross-cultural Constructs and Mass Communication Relations

Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus and the Little Haiti Cultural Art Center.

Miami, Florida. August 17th, 2013. 

Paper Title: Dance as an Agent of Change: Dance Traditions in a Global Community.

 By Jorge Luis Morejon

Department of Creative and Festival Arts

The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine

Trinidad and Tobago

Abstract: This essay discusses the adaptation of dance, primarily oriented towards the development of an aesthetic product to be consumed by the audience, into an agent of change for communities and individuals increasingly displaced, disenfranchised and isolated by disembodied, deculturized and thus homogenized social-political structures. In the midst of global despair, here dance is looked at as a medium for recovery of healthy, empowering and self-educating strategies that aim at the restoration of dances that could aid communities and individuals to reconnect with the core of their own traditions, cultures and mores. Dance is treated here as a relevant tool not only in the recovery of these communities and individuals but in their assessment. Therefore, this study establishes the links between scientific research in dance, dance styles and mass communication to arrive at dance models able to influence the academic shift needed to stimulate cultural crosspollination at an institutional level. The study references the areitos, the palenques and carnavales as forms of documentation that can inform new dance narratives able to link the institutional academic fields to communities in need of rescue.

LINK: http://www.mdc.edu/main/news/articles/2013/08/mdcto_host_ifeile_afro_cuban_dance_festi.aspx

Embodied Consciousness: Performance Technologies

Embodied Consciousness: Performance Technologies

Book Cover: Picture of Jorge Luis Morejon, performing the Shaman in The Elephant's Graveyard directed by Jade Rosina McCutcheon and performed at University of California, Davis. Photo, Jade Rosina McCutcheon.

Maria Antonia

 

 

A review


Cuban classic sweeps audience

Published: Sunday, April 28, 2013

Desiree Seebaran

For two weekends in April at the Little Carib Theatre, UWI theatre arts Production II students performed in Maria Antonia, a classic Cuban theatre piece written by Eugenio Hernandez Espinosa.

The play was an ambitious experiment that was very successful on a lot of levels. It was meant to work as a learning tool for the theatre students and a teaching tool for secondary school drama students, and it achieves that. Cuban theatre brings some familiar themes and locations to us, but present the challenge of having to decipher the subtle references and unlock hidden meanings before we can conquer the play.

UWI dance and theatre lecturer Dr Jorge Morejon directed, choreographed and translated the play. He did his work well; the physical direction and choreography was spot on. Every single cast member knew how to use the stage and how to move their bodies to advance the action and to set the tone.

The community holds hands and opens the play with a beautiful choral arrangement of Salve, adapted from a baroque composition by Esteban Salas, so that the first steps we take onto their territory are holy ground. The aggressively sexual way that Maria Antonia dances with and repels the men around her in a sort of my-balls-are-bigger-than-yours duel, is very funny and very sinister. And Robert Ashton Noel as Julian the boxer does a very good death scene; it’s very difficult not to get at least a few giggles from a local audience when you die onstage but he kept us swept up in the tragedy of the thing.

Syntyche Bishop (one of two actors who played in the role on alternate nights) had a powerful presence as Maria Antonia; we knew what she was feeling at every moment. And we felt her even when she was not on stage as we were meant to. She forced us to reconsider the stereotypes we carry in our heads of “women like that” and to mourn her when she ultimately runs up against the boundaries of her culture and her religion and her relationships to kill one lover and be killed by another lover.

And the other actors gave weighty performances as well: Daniella Sacha Johnson as a grieving godmother and Jarell Akini Alder as a stern, unforgiving Batabia, a Santeria priest. Marvin Dowridge, last seen in Proscenium Productions’ Little Shop of Horrors as a very credible Seymour Krelborn, was even more in his element here as a barrio youth trying to prove his machismo.

The dancing was effortlessly done; the stage really burst into flower during those moments, when the entire community is united by song and dance. I think the music is probably the best thing about this play; it holds a thread of understanding for the audience that the dialogue does not match. The play also portrayed Santeria in a context that many West Indians can relate to: colourful clothing, offerings, singing, dancing and going into the trance state to prophesy.

The only production flaw that really threw me was the dialogue, and by extension the translation. I am not a Spanish speaker, so I cannot pretend that the job that Morejon has done with the textual translation is anything other than the huge task that it is. But there were huge chunks of dialogue where, although the words were in English, I struggled to make sense and decipher the depth of what was really being said.

For instance, Maria Antonia and Carlo, one of her lovers, have a beautiful scene where they each have a different monologue but they recite their lines at the same time. It was executed flawlessly; neither detracted from the other, neither was distracted by the other and it successfully created a sort of surrealist dream world for the audience. But I’m positive that the dialogue made references to several important thematic touchstones that I should have picked up on, but didn’t because I couldn’t follow the thread of the monologues in English. It was actually easier to understand the prayers and chants spoken in Caribbean Yoruba; there, you get a sense of what is being said, and understand the spirit of the thing.

If the text were reworked again, I would go see this play a second and a third time. It dealt sensitively with the issue of poverty and marginalisation, without the hero complex we’ve learned to adapt from Hollywood and in full recognition of the spirit world that West Indians live with.

Maria Antonia, by Eugenio Hernandez Espinosa

Directed by Dr Jorge Morejon

UWI, St Augustine, Production II student production

Little Carib Theatre, April 4-7 and 12-14

LINK: http://www.guardian.co.tt/arts/2013-04-27/cuban-classic-sweeps-audience