Quinceañeras

A Quinceañera coincides with a girl's fifteenth birthday and marks her transition from child to adult. This Latin American celebration has its origins in European debutante balls, as well as in indigenous rites of passage. For their new choreography, Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez & Luisa Fernanda Alfonso drew inspiration from Quinceañeras. What role does performativity play in this staged ritual? At the same time, the artists also thoroughly examine the violence to which the ‘Quinceañera’ is subjected during the ritual.

In this full-length performance, the audience sees a space transformed into a salón comunal, a garage or a living room. The aesthetic of a Latin American birthday party prevails: in the plastic, deflated opulence, and the fascination with how Latin America imitates Western aristocratic extravagance. The challenge for the artists is to shape a new ritual through the medium of dance: to leave the contradictions between wealth and poverty, falsehood and originality, sacredness and mundanity, longing and connection, celebration and mourning behind.

Each in her turn, Estefania and Luisa embody the Quinceañera. Unannounced, they swap roles: from two friends sharing a birthday, twins, doppelgangers, to companions or lovers. In this constant transformation, they play as if they were children. Through ambiguity and the accumulation of roles, they play the male figures absent from the celebration for each other. They become their cousins and later their fathers, who they call upon and from whom they bid farewell. 

Estefania and Luisa want to evoke one of the achievements of the Quinceañera tradition: a new world in which the old, the traditional, the original, the folkloric, the clichéd, and the mysterious can coexist.

• Luisa Fernanda Alfonso is a dancer and choreographer from Bogotá, currently based in Berlin. She graduated from the Limón Professional Studies Program in New York City, holds a Bachelor in Dance from Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, and a Master of Arts in Solo/Dance/Authorship (SODA) from HZT Berlin. With a strong foundation in classical and modern dance, she approaches dance and performance as a carefully orchestrated, artificially theatrical device. Her affinity for sound composition, loudspeakers, and voice recordings is intrinsically interwoven with her choreographic thinking and creation. Since 2016, Luisa has collaborated with Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez on short choreographic compositions characterized by a humorous whimsy and a compelling need to explore their Latin American identity, their friendship, and their love for each other.

• Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez is a dancer, performer, and creator from Medellín, Colombia. She studied architecture in Colombia from 2010 to 2014. In 2019, she received a Bachelor in Modern Dance from Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, and in 2021 a Master's degree in Dance from P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. Her personal research is driven by the notions of ‘built’ and ‘unbuilt’ constructions: an investigation into how she can interweave her love of architecture, space, materiality, and collective and personal fictions. Sentimentality, imagery, nostalgia, and textual production are central in her research. She has collaborated with Geert Belpaeme, Bosse Provoost and Ezra Veldhuis, Carly Rae Heathcote, Ode de Kort, Keren Kraizer, Lydia McGlinchey, Leila Hekmat, and Lena Grossmann. She has also collaborated with Spazio Cura and designer and architect Thorben Gröbel, among others.