“1096” for PIFA (Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts)

“1096” represents the collaborative new performance installation work between Pasión y Arte and freshblood, a Flamenco and postmodern dance company.  The two all female-companies will interweave women’s stories through the multimedia layering of text, song and dance while investigating the dialogue between the distinct languages of its two artistic collaborators, flamenco and post-modern. We begin in 1096,  Salerno, Italy,  at the birth of the first female gynecologist, Trotula of Salerno, the first women to publish on the female body and whose textbooks became a reference for many centuries of male doctors.  Our time machine will visit pivotal periods of women’s history with a timeline that twists, coils and digs into contemporary questions of women’s self-knowledge, complicity, complacency and ultimately, “how do we reclaim our history?”