PERFORMANCE ART FESTIVALS

There have been several performance festivals throughout the island. The first such festival, appropriately titled Ana Mendieta’s First Festival of Performance (Primer Festival de Performance Ana Mendieta, Havana, 1998), was organized by the DUPP Gallery, a collective of emerging artists. These artists, guided by René Francisco Rodríguez (b. 1960), winner of the 2010 National Prize for Visual Arts, went to Jaruco in search of traces from Mendieta’s nature/performance pieces there in order to reframe “Cubanness” in an international context. Other festivals include Puente Sur’s Encounter of Performance and Interventions (Encuentro de Performance e Intervenciones Puente Sur, usually held in Mayabeque Beach (Melena del Sur), featuring installations as transformations of the physical environment; the Cienfuegos Performance Festival (Festival de Performance de Cienfuegos); and the Dead Hare Performance Encounter (Encuentro de Performance La Liebre Muerta) in Matanzas, whose name pays tribute to the influential German performance artist and sculptor Joseph Beuys (1921–1986). His work, in particular “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), is a referent as important to contemporary performance as it was to the 1980s generation. 

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