Artistic Statement, or, “what being a middle child taught me about art-making (besides the thrill of earning and holding someone’s attention)”

Dedicated to building community through dance, I am enlivened by pursuing collaborative arts-based projects that strive for fearless inquiry, affective curiosity, socio-political irreverence, and shameless bodies. Like many, I have come to know and understand the world through and with my body--researching, strategizing and manifesting new ways of relating to myself, my communities, form and cultural productions by bringing my blood memories into conversation with dances that lean in to the awkward, the cumbersome, the rasquache, and the hyper gestural. Fascinated with investigating character and dialogue and falsifying the natural, the normal and the useless, I make work that suffers from what I like to call middle child syndrome. 

WHAT BEING A MIDDLE CHILD TAUGHT ME ABOUT ART MAKING

middleENERGY: Have you ever tried forcing together the buttends of same-side magnets? You know that quaking, hot, slippery shake your hands do trying to manifest the satisfaction of reciprocal connection? That’s pure red hot middle child energy. Middle children are both the great instigators and the great pacifiers. It’s my experience conjuring disparate ends together that drives my desires to wonder about how to be better, how to transform, how to love and how to promote social curiosity through creative acts that are slippery, chaotic, funny and excessive. 

middleSPACE: I make work that moves in the Xicanx realms of the nepantla*, the in-between, the liminal, the ‘non-place’ places. Movement that slips around forever shifting foundations and is fascinated by both the perimeter and the proximal.

middleTIME: I believe in the power of manipulating time through performance. Rewinding, replaying, recreating, revisiting, and reckoning with ancient gestures in the present is something middle children do, PROBABLY! It’s this witnessed time warping that excites me most.

middleBODIES: How do we make space for all bodies to shine in the middle while returning home to our own bodies?

I create glitter showers out of box fans, shape-shifting avatars that teleport in fruit baskets, monologues about finally finding the perfect sushi metaphor to describe my sensuality, whistle choreography, hyperbolic changing stations, make-up play, and loops of repetitious movement to conjured subconscious states.

BIO

Erica Saucedo is a movement artist, educator, and scholar based in Austin, Texas. Erica's pedagogy, artistry, and organizing efforts are guided by questions of legacy, leadership, and longevity:

• LEGACY how can performance act as a site for self-manifestation, refiguring written history in order to embody social and personal survival? how is critical freedom performed today, tomorrow and in the traditions of ancestors?

• LEADERSHIP how can dancers exercise various roles inside of decentralized power structures? how can the practice of making and studying dance empower practitioners to be artists in and of communities?

• LONGEVITY how is the practice of making and studying dance useful for the sustainability of the (art)world? inspired by Grace Lee Boggs and Black Feminist epistemology, how can we embrace the idea that we are the leaders we have been searching for? how are we activating dance as ancestors in training?

Erica received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and has been commissioned to create works for Offbeat X (BLiPSWiTCH, Austin), Mini Movement Festival (Dallas, TX), First Street Studio (Austin, TX), 92Y Street Festival (New York, NY), Danspace Project (New York, NY), Triskelion Arts (New York, NY), Austin Dance Festival (Austin, TX), and the Actors Fund Center (New York, NY). Saucedo is a 2019 ARCOS Dance Artist Development Award grantee and a 2019-2021 resident artist in the Latino Artist Access Program (L.A.A.P.) at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican-American Cultural Center.