Cristina Maldonado is a Mexican artist, whose background in body movement lends a unique approach to her visual and conceptual experiments with video, sound, collage and performance, giving a palpable tactility that not only invokes the audience sensually, but also leads us to the realm of comfort and beyond.
“What she does” is a project of Mexican artist Cristina Maldonado (choreographer provoked by video and film) in which she recycles films to create visual collages in real time. It is a performance that reinterprets a thriller from the 60´s by making live physical interventions to invade and damage the composition, atmosphere and situation of the scenes.
Watching a film usually puts us in a receptive but passive role: we follow the plot of the movie and are open to it, but our feelings, reactions and interpretations cannot change the film in any concrete way. For instance in this thriller shot in 1960′s a woman facing jeopardy, mind manipulation, sadism, coercion and kidnapping; the subconscious reactions of the viewer remain invisible and alienated to the film unless an active witness can materialize them. In What She Does the performer becomes that active witness and invades the film with symbolic actions changing the movie physically, affecting what is seen in the frame of the action, resisting, agreeing and commenting the situations, dealing with her own fear, her need to destroy evil and her need to identify with it, and hence a whole new layer of interpretation into the story.
Maldonado succeeds in altering not only the narrative of the movie we are watching, but also the storytelling of our own emotions, commenting on universal themes such as the need to overcome our primal fears by identifying with and destroying evil.
Cristina maldonado has performed in Mexico, Eastern Europe, Lisbon, Cyprus, Armenia, New York and Montreal.
Author, performer: Cristina Maldonado
Live sound: Pavel Semchenko
Movement Design: Věra Ondrašíková
Photography: Jan Morávek
Production: Jedefrau Org.
Running time — 60’’.
