Ramificando
A collaboration with Merián Soto
Performance by Merián Soto.
El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico.Ramificando is a site-responsive performance by Puerto Rican choreographer and artist Merián Soto, presented as part of RÍO (movimiento) at El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico.
Developed through Soto’s Branch Dance, an aesthetic-somatic practice she has explored since 2005, the work investigates connections between body, landscape, movement, and memory, drawing from branching structures found in trees, rivers, and human anatomy.
I participated in the project as a guest violinist and performer, bringing my background in music and performance into a hybrid practice where sound, movement, and embodied presence operated simultaneously. My participation explored how sound and the performing body could enter into dialogue with the landscape and other forms of organic presence.
This experience connects with my broader research into hybrid and transdisciplinary practices and my interest in questioning the boundaries between artistic disciplines, bodies, and environments. Within Ramificando, these questions extended toward the more-than-human: how might we listen, move, and compose when trees, branches, water, bodies, and sound become part of a shared performative ecology?
Created in dialogue with the living environment of El Yunque, Ramificando invited performers and audiences to attend to subtle forms of movement, balance, listening, and interdependence, creating a space where artistic practice, ecology, and collective experience could converge.
Artistic Direction: Merián Soto
Co-direction / Collaboration: Marion Ramírez
Performers: Merián Soto, Marion Ramírez, Ángel Blanco, Javier Cardona, Jaime Maldonado, Awilda Rodríguez Lora
Guest Violinist & Performer: Mayte Olmedilla
Costume Design: María de Azúa
Presented by: ArteYUNQUE and theartwalkpr
Location: El Portal de El Yunque, Puerto Rico
