Xavier Lopez Performance #11: Overview - On the Edge: First International Latinx Performance Art Festival.

In 2016, I, alongside La Sala/La Cocina, with organizational assistance from Lauren Davis, created "On the Edge: Latinx Performance Art," the first all-Latinx performance art festival in Seattle. We came to understand how profoundly new this concept was-worldwide, when Marvin Carlson named our event in Routledge's textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction" becoming part of university curricula across the globe. We are working toward creating the second biennial event in 2021--moved forward due to the current pandemic.

“La Cocina” was a series of summer events using the notion of ‘cooking’ as a creative metaphor for the development of new artistic work. Headlined by a month-long pop-up salon in Pioneer Square’s new “Good Arts” building, a cohort of curators (a multi-disciplinary group of professional Latino arts leaders and artists in visual, dance, theatrical, music, and literary arts) programmed each week with events and exhibitions mixing ‘ingredients’ from the diversity of Latino/a/x history and cultures. Coinciding with the Seattle Art Fair for visibility, the new visual and performing works created for “La Cocina” blended technology with heritage, as well as local and international flavors of ‘Latino Futurism’ and performance art to audiences and participants.

The first On the Edge Festival was a one-night event, small but expansive, dedicated to serving Seattle and the Seattle Latinx community, giving voice to local Latinx Artists presenting work that is rarely seen in our communities.

Xavier Lopez is a contemporary, Latinx/o conceptual, mixed media and performance artist. Lopez received his MFA from the University of California, Davis, where he created the theoretical/artistic thesis of the "Soft Cyborg." He is part of a young group of artists who are seeking to move beyond contemporary mainstream art ideas, becoming post-genre, mixing sculpture, performance art, theory, painting and anything else they can get their hands on to create something exciting and new. 

"In 2016, I was asked to program an evening of performance art for La Sala Latinx Artists Network’s ‘La Cocina’ in Pioneer Square, which exceeded all our hopes."  

Xavier Lopez and Lauren Davis put together the very first Latinx Performance Art Festival. (They are currently planning more in the series.) Then in 2017, Xavier Lopez alongside Vicente Montanez were cited in the Routledge critical theoretical textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction"--by Marvin Carlson in the third edition of his seminal work, as leading figures in the Latinx Performance Art movement, something for which they are extremely proud.

"As a Latinx performance artist, I knew our 2016 event was unique and vital to the Seattle community, showcasing Latina/x/o artists' identity and genre-expanding work. But none of us could imagine that our event would become part of worldwide university curricula inspiring a new generation of Latina/x/o artists. Academic Marvin Carlson wrote in Routledge's textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction,” “There is a growing body of...artists who specifically identify themselves as Latinx, headed by...Xavier Lopez...featured in the first festival of Latinx performance, held at the Good Arts center...in Seattle... Latinx represents an important orientation in modern performance... concern(ed) with developing more inclusive and flexible attitudes toward designations of gender, race, and ethnicity...addressing this major reorientation of the field." --original wording about our event, which was later updated to include the creation of Putoh. 

This, then is the final wording for the book "Performance: A Critical Introduction" straight from the pen of Marvin Carlson: 

"The First Latinx performance venue was established in 2013, the Teatro Publico de Cleveland, and there is a growing body of theatre artists who specifically identify themselves as Latinx, headed by Xavier Lopez Jr. and Vicente Montanez. Lopez created the first festival of Latinx performance, held at the Good Arts center for experimental theatre in Seattle in 2016, in which Montanez performed. Lopez is also co-creator, with performance artist Katherine Adamenko of New York City, of Putoh performance, a melding of Chicano performance art and contemporary art inspired by Butoh." 

Lopez is part of a new breed of Latinx artists for whom art-making, while still personal and autobiographical in the broadest sense, eschews the obvious tropes of masculinity, hegemony and race.  As an Hispanic artist, it has become clear to Lopez over the course of his thirty-plus year career that his work has focused on a more personal kind of conceptualism, centering on autobiography and his own set of obsessions, hopes and fears.

Vicente Montanez at the first Latinx Performance from On The Edge: Latinx Performance Art Festival: This image spotlights Vicente Montanez performance from our first festival in 2016. The evening of August 5, 2016. On the Edge: Latinx Performance Art featured experimental performance art by contemporary Latino/a/x artists, featuring Xavier Lopez, Jr. and Vicente Montanez and coincided with the 2016 Seattle Art Fair and was part of the programming for the exhibit La Sala presents La Cocina.

"On the Edge" is aptly named as it is all about the cutting edge, it is about intersections and breaking the bounds and definitions of history. Latinx is, perhaps, the first movement of the twenty-first century and may, in fact be the first redefinition of the post-postmodern era. Latinx is a true reinvention and reinvesting of what it means to be Latino, through performance, through our work, I and other contemporary Latinx artists are defining a term that is defined by complexity, criticality and biographical and theoretical strength creating a "Latinoism" based on alliances that owes more of its form to the Queer and Feminist programs that lead the way for identity movements than to an essentialized Latino-ness. This festival seeks to engender, enlarge and expand the conversation of what Latina/x/o art is and what it can be. We live at a time in which definitions of race, masculinity, gender and art are changing, and "On the Edge" seeks to be a leading voice in this change.