Luisa Fernanda Alfonso and Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez are two Colombian artists, from Bogotá and Medellín respectively, that finished their B.A. in dance at the Folkwang University of the Arts in 2019. Since 2016 they have been creating together and their work has been presented in Tanz Tangente in Berlin, the Atelier of PACT Zollverein in Essen and in Simultanhalle in Cologne. Luisa completed her SODA MA at HZT in Berlin in 2022 and Estefanía her STUDIOS MA at PARTS in Brussels in 2021. They approach dance and performance with a humorous capriciousness, with an urgency to investigate their latin-americanness and their love for each other. Their intimacy and close friendship are their drive for creation and also their tools for subversion. After going through extremely meticulous kinetographic studies at Folkwang their creations are a clear clashing of two worlds: western composition structures depicting their nostalgia for home and their feeling of absence.

This work is a choreographic project by Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez and Luisa Fernanda Alfonso inspired by Quinceañera parties. It intends to explore and celebrate their womanhood and Colombian origin with its music, traditions and aesthetics. But also to twist, reappropriate and resignify these forms according to their own current artistic and geographical situation. 

The Quinceañera is a Latin-American festivity celebrating the transition from childhood to womanhood, coinciding with a girl's 15th birthday. While descending from the ancient European ‘debutante ball’, in which noble young women of marriageable age were presented before society, in time the old colonisers' traditions are combined with indigenous pre-Columbian rites of passage and with present day capitalistic and globalised influences. The misinterpretation and mimicking of European traditions has led to spreading this fabled festivity and detaching it from its original aristocratic contexts to popular ones too.

The work will investigate the theme of the passage to womanhood and its performativity, the inclusion in the categories of a society, the richness and theatricality of its staged ritual, but also the violence that is imposed in the Quinceañera by such a ritualisation. Because of their in-between condition as migrants – their double presence and their double absence – and through their friendship as an active agent in the process of creation and in their presence on stage, Estefanía and Luisa will delve into questioning their relationship with colonial heritage, the exportation of traditions and their reinvention, the rewriting of stories and queering of narratives. 

Quinceañeras will include traces of diverse latin music genres, as well as traces of their respective social, community and folklore dances. While creating movement material, Luisa and Estefanía freely explore the interaction between western and non western historical references and styles, rip them from their context and reinvent them as autonomous forms, creating thus a new, layered, individual and collective language. The Quinceañera party is an example of imposed western traditions being embraced, reappropriated and alienated from their origin to be turned into empowerment and celebration. In more ways than one we will seek to re-experience and reiterate what the Quinceañera tradition achieved: a new world where the old, the traditional, the original, the folkloric, the rigid, the corny and the mysterious can coexist. As a choreographic strategy, Estefanía and Luisa delve into a romance of excessive images, dances and references, bringing heterogeneous elements to clash: a contest of joropo in a small village in the mountains of Colombia, an acrobatic duet demonstrating ballet skills, the casual and inelegant corporeality of torbellino and sanjuanero dancers, virtuoso Russian character dances, extravagant salsa cabaret championships, Balanchine’s least famous duets, Luisas’ cousin’s first communion party, bachata flamenco, Baccara’s ‘Yes sir, i can boogie’, commercial reggaeton choreographies, Bob Fosse uncanny language, the mourning but vibrant drums of cumbia and bullerengue, Estefanía’s aunts and uncles dancing at her mom’s funeral, Kate Bush’s unhinged performances, bambuco pageant festival and more.

Luisa and Estefanía will navigate this work through an unannounced shifting of roles and forms of embodying the Quinceañera: from friends sharing their birthday, to twins, reflections of each other, doubles, doppelgänger, and even companions or lovers. In a constant transformation, through ambiguity and accumulation, they will role play the ponderous masculine figures of the party for one another, as if they were children playing. They will be their male cousins and later their fathers, in between a summoning and a farewell, questioning and transfiguring their ghosts. Through the aesthetics of a birthday party, through its plastic and accessible opulence, the challenge will perhaps be that of shaping a new ritual to manifest transformation through dance, inhabiting and dissolving the dichotomies between youth and maturity, richness and poverty, falseness and originality, holiness and mundanity, longing and belonging, partying and mourning. There will be flowers, laces, bows, ribbons, balloons, candles, chandeliers, dolls, puffy dresses, hora loca, singing, dancing, togetherness, friendship, aguardiente, absences and crying. But most importantly it will be a celebration of life, friendship and ageing together.