Creative Performance in Crisis
Transdisciplinary Gestures Inventory for Resistance
Creative Performance in Crisis is a fictional paper specifically created for participation in the I Jornada de Investigación en Artes Performáticas, held at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca and organized by the Artea Collective. The proposal begins with a reading of all the emails and communications received, each delivering rejections to Mayte Olmedilla’s potential participation in various festivals and theatrical calls across Spain and Europe. In this piece, Mayte Olmedilla aims to expose the violence embedded in the language, communication, and labor structures governing the contracting of artists.
This work also seeks to generate art from the space of refusal, empowering the creative act itself over the dominant external structures that typically control artistic processes and work from a purely mercantile perspective. The paper concludes with a retrospective on Mayte Olmedilla’s early experiences in commercial theater, where the construction of a compliant and submissive feminine aesthetic in response to the patriarchal system, operating both in public and private cultural spheres, is unveiled.