Directly aligned with its founding mission that was established 12 years ago, homeLA excavates manmade structures and their relationship to the land upon which they are built. Through performance, movement, visual story telling and experimental, undefined art, homeLA brings new ideas into historical contexts.
This weekend, Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 8 and 9, from 1 to 4 p.m., homeLA in partnership with the La Puente Valley Historical Society will present “Redrawing the Rancho” at the Rowland Mansion in La Puente.
Curated by homeLA’s executive and artistic director, Chloe Flores, four highly respected women creatives, Eva Aguila, Nao Bustamante, Victoria Marks and Rosa Rodríguez-Frazier, explore, re-imagine, confront and reinterpret the history of what promotional materials label as SoCal’s oldest surviving brick edifice.
Individually, the contributing artists have designed performance, dance and installation pieces that investigate backstories of colonization, agriculture and industrialization that surround this landscape.
The program begins with choreographer Rodriguez-Frazier’s triptych that mixes movement, personal narratives, archival texts and music. The piece travels from the manor’s porch to its surrounding grounds and then to a repurposed water tank to “bring to life the voices of women who have shaped Rancho La Puente.”
At the start, “Recetas de La Casa Rowland” welcomes the audience with Maria De Los Angeles Rodríguez sharing buñuelos and champurrado, blending northern Mexican flavors with recipes from the historic home. In “Peregrinaje for Maria,” dance and soundscapes honor the first wife of Mr. Rowland, Encarnacion Martinez. In a movement pilgrimage from the Dibble Museum to the residence, the matriarch’s faith and resilience are celebrated. Finally, in a quartet for women on the dwelling porch that is underscored by Daniel Hill’s percussion, “Casita” translates Alice Karstens Rowland’s diary through the “gestures of daily life and the quiet strength of the women” of and around the Rowland Mansion.
Eva Aguila’s “The Land Holds Your Name” uses a fertility ritual that harkens back to her own Purépecha heritage via traditional copper bells, spoken word and “infrasounds recorded on the land.” Working with the site’s connection to early Spanish wine production, this “collective witnessing, remembrance and healing” has been created to “honor Indigenous ancestors whose names were erased from colonial narratives.”
Multi-award-winning performance-plus artist Bustamante flies into aviation as she uncages the narratives surrounding industrialization and the fate of local birds over time. Having researched histories of aviary migratory patterns around Rowland Mansion, “Attracting Bluebirds” is described as a “living archive of images and sounds” that fuel the artist’s outdoor performance.
In “Las Cosiendas,” dancemaker and UCLA faculty member Marks “animates and unsettles the Mansion’s histories” into what the artist describes as “choreo-portraits” of a group of women who, between 1914 and 1964, gathered to “sew and socialize.” Working with archival photographs and oral histories of the La Puente Women’s Club, “sewing becomes a metaphor for mending, repairing and connecting across generations.” Aurally, the accompanying score replaces the lyrics of the traditional song “La Bruja” with a cascade of names of mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers of Kizh, Spanish, Mexican and Californian ancestry. These are the women that have preceded and preserved the Rowland Mansion.
–Benn Widdey, Culture Spot LA
LOCATION:
Rowland Mansion, 16021 Gale Ave., City of Industry 91745
TICKETS:
$15-$35 + service fee (12 and under are free)
INFO:
Photo from Rosa Rodríguez-Frazier’s “Peregrinaje for María” by Amina Cruz