Asking questions about authorship, audience participation, and what defines performance, Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist and choreographer Yanira Castro explores the meaning and power of people gathering together. For Castro, structures for witnessing are a direct reflection of politics, which is to say relations and power. In each piece, she reimagines human and spatial relationships critical to how the work functions. Her work is rooted in communal construction, inviting the public into co-creation as a practice of radical democracy. Grounded in participatory, immersive installations and performance, the work inhabits sites—theaters, tables, podcasts, the page—as places of in-process communion.

Castro is a co-author of Creating New Futures’ Phase 1: Working Guidelines for Ethics & Equity in Presenting Dance & Performance and Phase 2: Notes for Equitable Funding from Arts Workers, calls-to-action addressing deep-rooted inequities in the field. 

photo: Maria Baranova