During my month-long stay in Ecuador with my father, who, as an artist-teacher with the Peace Corps inquired with this person and that person to arrange for me to meet and enjoy time with Ecuadorian choreographer Wilson Pico. Then noted as a solo dance artist, he’d been a student of Martha Graham and it was the technique he taught to his students he invited me to observe. In our private conversation he spoke passionately about developing a “national style” in his dancework. We spoke especially about the solo art form, sharing the purview that the form allows for the humanity of the ‘everyman/everywoman’ to shine through, that is, it yields the capacity to embody abstract ideas in the lived personal realm, giving universal ideas a personal face–particularity–as one who navigates the human condition of being human. Wilson said to me, “Make a work that reflects your time here.”
My father also introduced me to the work the famed Ecuadorian painter and sculptor, Oswaldo Guayasamin. We visited his artist studio,-–unlike any I’d ever seen, more like a multi-leveled busy factory where Guayasamin’s prints and paintings were being framed and fired onto decorative vases several of which I brought home to my family. Meeting with and having exposure to these artists and learning something about the life of Ecuadorian peoples from Esmeralda to Guayaquil to Quito found homage in my dancework, Las Manos/The Hands: A Portrait. For the 16-minute solo work I earned my second Judith Stark/Los Angeles Area Dance Alliance Vanguard Award for Outstanding Choreography for Solo Performance (1983).
Las Manos (The Hands); A Portrait Performance Photos
