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Holy Terrors

Latin American Women Perform

Diana Taylor, Alexei Taylor, Authors
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Nao Bustamante: Plays and Performances

'Sparkler' is a compressed moment, an image the speaks of vulnerability, shame and pride rolled into one. The celebration of a woman, prone.


'Indigurrito'
is Bustamante's contribution to the many performances that commemorated the 500 anniversary of the conquest of America. The title mixes the term 'indigenous' with 'burrito', the name of the famous Mexican wrap. In the performance, Bustamante challenged the white men in the audience to go onstage to express their apologies for the years of oppression of indigenous peoples by eating a piece of a burrito that Bustamante had strapped on to her hips. With humor and sarcasm, Bustamante addressed the issues that the 500-year commemoration brought to collective attention. Her piece also denounces how art institutions forced artists to pay tribute to the date if they wanted to get funding.


'Sans Gravity'
is a performance/action in which Nao introduces her head into a plastic bag filled with water and then tapes it tightly onto her neck. She then sits down upright with the bag on her head. The action creates a real and urgent situation that the artist has to respond to. It ends when Nao, after a minute and twenty seconds, gets free from the water-bag finally breathing like a fish out of water.

'The Chain South' is a satire on the corporate and popcultural relations between Mexico and the U.S. In this short film, Nao played the vagabond Ronaldo McDonaldo. Nao and the director, Miguel Calderon, traveled south from San Francisco across the Mexican border, stopping along the way at McDonald's.

'Lifestyle' is shaped by the architecture of fantasy. Filled with an understated fetish for the purity of surface, 'Lifestyle' subtly shifts the power between the three characters until the viewer is unsure of who is in charge in this superficial, yet fulfilling landscape.


Video documentation of Nao Bustamantes solo performance America the Beautiful presented as part of the 3rd Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, celebrated in July of 2002 in Lima, Peru under the title Globalization, Migration and the Public Sphere. America the Beautiful is a body-narrative, which begins with the performer literally setting the stage. Through the rituals of feminine transformation, using clear packing tape and haphazard make-up, Bustamante creates a distorted reality of beauty with all of its eros and defeat. This tragic/comedy takes the viewer on a bizarre circus-like adventure of ladder climbing and breath-holding tension.
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