Passage of the Spiral is a film by Puerto Rican artist Natalia Lassalle-Morillo. Based in the small town of Santo Domingo Yanhuiltán in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, it is a portrait of a place. The film is rooted in the stories of local youth who are artists and actors working with lauded theatre collective Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol via an artistic and pedagogical workshop entitled Proyecto Yivi. From this central point, the film curves outwards to include an intergenerational cast of characters who, through interviews, share from their own life experiences. The landscape of the Mixteca Region becomes an important protagonist and holder of truths as the film expands north to California.
University students from CalArts in Los Angeles collaborate with youth to collectively work on the play El Camino Donde Nosotros Lloramos, the story of which nests within, and blurs the boundaries between, the spaces of theatre, film, and reality. Acting and collective storytelling are espoused by the community as a therapeutic vehicle and north star to explore personal and collective relationships with the Mexico-United States border— one that has plagued the relationship between the two countries and the lives of innumerable people and families. It is the same border that consumed the life and work of Chicana scholar and poet Gloria Anzaldúa. Her poem, “New Speakers,” which this year’s festival uses as a thematic jumping-off point, is a poetic parallel to Passage of the Spiral –both emphasizing the power of words and collectivity.
As Natalia brings forth a community immersed in the potential of the theatre space as a liberating commons, she shares a transnational story that is, essentially, not her own, foregrounding the politics of storytelling in order to question who has the right to tell a story and why.
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (Bayamón, Puerto Rico) is an artist and director whose research-based practice reconstructs memory and history through a transdisciplinary and participatory approach. Merging theatrical performance, experimental film, and installation, her work decentralizes canonical and colonial narratives through collaborations with non-professional performers, artists, and researchers. Natalia’s projects develop across localities and narratives, exploring Caribbean collective memory and the material and spiritual trajectories that have shaped families and relationships impacted by the imperialist oppression in that region. Bringing theater-based methodologies into the camera, she rehearses an alternative historiography that revises collective relationships to the past and simultaneously foregrounds the creation of new mythologies and fictions.