Matemurga was founded in August 2002. Its founder and director, Edith Scher, is an Argentinian writer, musician, academic and actress. The works of Matemurga centre community singing and music, with the use of orchestras and puppets. For Matemurga, community theatre is theatre created specifically by neighbours and performed for neighbours. Through her approach and methodology,…
Corporación Humor y Vida [‘humor and life’] is composed of women artists from Ecuador and Colombia. They work on the contested borderlands between their two countries, an area frequently used for illegal crossings and also by guerrilla fighters. “Humor y Vida” Corporation has been a cultural organization since 2007 attached to the Ministry of…
Arts in Action (AiA) is a multidisciplinary arts organisation that has been working throughout Trinidad’s grassroot communities for over 25 years. It offers costume design workshops, choreography, participatory theatre, and music for steel pan orchestras. It is a not-for-profit unit of the Department of Creative and Festival Arts of the University of the West Indies…
Museu dos meninos, ‘Museum of Children’, is a transdisciplinary arts project that involves mapping the collection and preservation of narratives and memories of Afro-Brazilian youth between the ages of 15 and 29. These young men live in the Complexo do Alemão, an area composed of many favelas in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Male youth…
Amparo González Sola’s (1984, Argentina) (she/her) work spans dance, choreography, and participative projects, and is distinctly influenced by feminist activism and her experience of migration. Her earlier works include The conspiracy of forms (2023) and If every rock is a hole (2022), presented at the SPRING Performing Arts Festival, and the participative project Exploring Reciprocity…
Alida Neslo was born in 1954 in Paramaribo, Suriname. She studied theatre and dance in Belgium and Senegal, but after living and working in Antwerp and Amsterdam for a long time, she decided to go back to Suriname in 2005. During her time in Belgium and the Netherlands she worked as a performer in ground…
Born in Medellín, Colombia, Héctor Aristizábal is a therapist, actor, director, and activist with over 40 years of experience. In 1989, he was forced to emigrate to the United States due to violence in his home country. There, he worked as a bilingual therapist with vulnerable groups, including people affected by HIV/AIDS, gang members, prisoners,…
João Junior is a professional theatre maker who works both at the community-level (out of passion) and in more mainstream settings (to earn a living). His roots lie in the Sertão, the impoverished and drought-ridden northeastern part of Brazil from where, for decades now, people have been migrating to the south in search of a…
Until a couple of years ago, Carroça never stopped travelling around Brazil, always establishing profound relations with local communities wherever they happened to land. The company is very much a family enterprise and today encompasses three generations and many different performance disciplines. These include puppetry, music, clowning, storytelling, and a variety of arts and crafts.…
Barrio Comparsa [‘neighborhood parade’] was founded in 1990 in the Manrique Oriental area of Medellín by Luis Fernandez García and five of his friends. It was a time when large areas of the city were still heavily ruled by drug-related criminal activities associated with the cartel of Pablo Escobar Gaviria, his competitors and his paramilitary…