Quinceañeras

Quinceañeras is inspired by a tradition shared across Latin America: a girl’s fifteenth birthday party, a ceremony  in which she is symbolically presented to the world as a woman. It is a ritual born from colonial and indigenous echoes, reappropriated across time as a statement of belonging and a celebration of Latin-American existence, a utopian evening where girls are transformed into dream modern capitalist princesses for one night and aging becomes uncanny as the gap between childhood and womanhood blurs.

In Quinceañeras Luisa and Estefanía metamorphose this tradition into a choreography of inheritance and reinvention. They interpret the coming of age ritual as an imaginary space, indulging in transformation, lingering between performance and attempted reenactment: a shifting landscape; part party, part dream. The ritual of becoming a woman is rehearsed, questioned and reassembled, and familiar scripts of femininity stretch and soften through exaggeration and tenderness.

By dancing, Estefanía and Luisa blend memory and fiction, within the intimacy of their friendship, like two children playing. They look back with nostalgia and curiosity, longing and joy, mischievousness and pride, holding hands. They dance to misplace borders, transforming across a stage haunted by absence and excess, revealing and embracing the deflating Latin American pessimism which coexists with resistance, loudness, warmth, smiles and festivity.

• Luisa Fernanda Alfonso and Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez are two Colombian artists, from Bogotá and Medellín respectively. Since 2016 they have been creating together. They approach dance and performance with a humorous capriciousness, with an urgency to investigate their latin-americanness and their love for one another. Their intimacy and close friendship are both their drive for creation and their tools for subversion. After going through extremely meticulous kinetographic studies at Folkwang University together for 4 years, their creations are a clear clashing of worlds: western composition structures depicting their nostalgia for home and feeling of absence. Quinceañeras is their first evening-length work to premiere late spring 2026.