The backdrop of the
project is the uncertain and fragmented space of my family history through the
figure of my great aunt, Elfriede Mahler, an American dancer and choreographer.
Accused of being a communist during the McCarthy era in the Untitled States,
she fled and sought asylum in Cuba immediately following the revolution in
1959. In Cuba she became one of the founding members of the modern dance school
in Havana and then relocated to Guantánamo City dedicating the rest of her life
to founding and directing the dance company Danza Libre, which
merges modern dance with Afro-Cuban dance traditions developed in the region.
Reconstruction of a Choreographic
Script consists
of a series of paper cut out collages and a multi channel video. The script
created by Elfriede Mahler was originally outlined in the mid 1960s at the
school of modern dance in Havana and developed through the 1990s in Guantanamo.
The choreography was broken up into six acts, which told the story of European
colonization and American imperialism from the perspective of labor rights in
the combined styles of modernist dance, folkloric traditions and soviet
inspired socialist realism. This original script no longer exists and instead
the present script presented in the exhibition is built on remaining archival
fragments, labanotation, oral narratives and gaps in collective memory.
Archival negatives of Elfride Mahler in Guantanamo Cuba, 1972.
