This choreographic project by Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez and Luisa Fernanda Alfonso is inspired by Quinceañera parties, a Latin-American festivity celebrating the transition from childhood to womanhood, coinciding with a girl's 15th birthday. On this day, the coming of age girl is called the ‘Quinceañera’. The celebration itself is rooted in European debutante balls and combined with indigenous rites of passage is an example of imposed colonial traditions being reappropriated and turned into forms of empowerment. This work will investigate the performativity of its staged ritual, but also the violence that is imposed on the Quinceañera by such a ritualisation. As Colombians living and working in Europe, Estefanía and Luisa navigate this theme through their migratory perspectives, using their friendship as an active agent in the process of creation and in their presence on stage to question their relationship with colonial heritage, the exportation of traditions and the reinvention of narratives.  

 Quinceañeras will be an evening-length work in which the audience will witness the theatre transformed into a ‘salón comunal’ or a garage or a living room, a new space where dance, music and sentimentality find themselves entangled in an extravagant celebratory event. Through the aesthetics of a Latin-American birthday party, through its plastic and deflated opulence, and with fascination to Latin-America’s mimicking of western aristocratic extravagance, the challenge will be that of shaping a new ritual through dance, to inhabit and dissolve the dichotomies between richness and poverty, falseness and originality, holiness and mundanity, longing and belonging, partying and mourning. 

Friendship, care and intimacy are the driving force of this creation. They will embody the Quinceañera through an unannounced shifting of roles: 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, as if they were children playing, they will role play the absent masculine figures of the party for one another and challenge the violence imposed on the Quinceañera within this tradition. They will be their male cousins and later their fathers, in between a summoning and a farewell, questioning and transfiguring their ghosts.  

Luisa and Estefanía will choreographically explore the interaction between western and Latin-American movement styles, delving into a romance of excessive images, dances and references, bringing seemingly incompatible elements to clash. This work seeks to 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. Set as a poignant fabled festivity, this work is most importantly a rebellious celebration of womanhood, shared heritage, friendship, ageing and life.