Keep it Moving
Installation-Performance
in Honor of Merian Soto
Tyler School of Art and Architecture,
Temple University
Keep it Moving is an installation-performance conceived as an homage to the renowned Puerto Rican choreographer, interdisciplinary artist and professor Merián Soto, presented at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in February 2025 and curated by Ally Messer, Silvana Cardell and Mayte Olmedilla. The work activated the space as an expanded perceptual field, where body, sound and shared presence generated an atmosphere of radical attention and sensory openness.
Inspired by Soto’s choreographic practice—rooted in slowness, inner listening and connection to the natural world—the piece unfolded through a logic of performative improvisation, allowing for the emergence of the unexpected and the constant transformation of its compositional elements. As a performer and violist, I approached this process from a transdisciplinary position, moving between sonic gesture and bodily presence in a flow that blurred the traditional boundaries between music and dance.
Rather than representing a fixed repertoire or linear narrative, Keep it Moving manifested as a living ecosystem of resonances: minimally shifting bodies, repetitive actions, suspended objects and interwoven visual and sonic materials formed an expanded choreography. Performance here was not about execution, but about active presence—a mode of relation and a way of inhabiting mystery.
My participation, grounded in both instrumental and embodied practice, required full openness to the contingency of the moment. The viola became not only an instrument, but an extension of the sensing body—generating vibrations that dialogued with other moving bodies, with silence and with the space itself. This transdisciplinary approach allowed for access to a more fluid artistic dimension, where conventional aesthetic categories dissolve in favor of a shared, embodied and sensorial experience.
Keep it Moving does not attempt to crystallize Merián Soto’s legacy, but to activate it. As one of her former students, this project became a form of reconnection with a pedagogy that understands art as a transformative practice, as deep listening and as a subtle form of resistance. In this piece, the homage is not a closure, but an opening: an invitation to keep moving, resonating and inhabiting uncertainty with presence and care.
