Video Editing, Choreography, & Direction: Yoli Alma-Flor

Documentation By Nicole Won, New Ngam, Maria Pelayo

Featured in Video/ Project: Yoyo Romero, Canelo Cabrera, Leti Morales, New Ngam, Christhmus Presence, Champoy Lim, Hop Nguyen, Uta Tamate Weiss, Yoli Alma-Flor

“Rain Lluvia” (multimedia prayer) is video art piece , part of a greater multimedia prayer, for the Rain to cleanse the wound of genocide as it lives on in the bodies of IndigiQueer/Qtbipoc beings and as it lives here on this Earth.

A Teatro De La Vida performance ensemble came together to create the improvisational choreography that was the RainLluvia Live Performance. The live documentation of the event and pieces of footage in the desert were woven together in this video.

My artistic goal with this video was to transform performance documentation into something that captured the essence and ephemeral experience of what occurred in this overall prayer and at the live performance. The memory of what happened isn’t as important to me as the memory of what was felt, and I wanted to transform the performance documentation to reflect that.

“Rain Lluvia” is a collective water limpia and mutli-media, living prayer to the Rain to cleanse the wound of genocide as it lives on in the bodies of IndigiQueer/Qtbipoc beings and as it lives here on this Earth. A Teatro De La Vida performance ensemble came together to create the improvisational choreography that was the RainLluvia Live Performance. Teatro De La Vida, is a fluid “performance-based healing ensemble” where the roads of ancestral arts and healing practices meet performance art and experimental theatre.

RainLluvia found home:

• As Workshops and Gatherings

• A Live performance

• As ephemera from that performance: costumes, an indiqiqueer corn doll & corn silk braid, photos/documentation

• A video piece made from the documentation of the live performance (20min)

• Maiz grown and prepared into pozole and shared to thank those who wove into this prayer

• And as love, friendship, and care

Across mediums, Rain Lluvia followed this poem as an embodied meditation and prayer inspiring the direction of the project:

We emerge from the 7 Caves of Creation (Chicomoztoc)

Crossing the choppy waters within “the memory of our blood” on a canoe

On this journey we come to see the hauntings we carry with us to the other

shore

In the breath of it all, we make this journey to lay our offerings for the Rain

(Tlaloc)

To be touched by the Water From The Sky

And cleanse the Earth that lives within each of us

As a prayer so that the children can be free from the worlds and futures we

have seeded

During the gatherings and the live performance, members of Teatro De La Vida each wore a prayer bundle holding a blue dine maiz kernel. On the new moon in scorpio that maiz got planted and on the full moon in scorpio it got harvested and shared as pozole on Dia De Los Muertos with those who wove into the prayer and greater bay area indigiqueer/qtbipoc community.