SEASON 34 | November 2021

Obituary

A Poetic Ritual by Eva Margarita

Presented by The VORTEX

Obituary is a poetic ritual in grief. In an exploration of our collective mourning, this performance offers new ways of hailing, remembering, and reinterpreting death. Done through a conjuring practice, Eva Margarita will make activated charcoal as a means for creating an ink that acknowledges the personal and social stains that are impossible to remove from the body. As a mode of critical accompaniment, audience members will have a chance to listen to, sit with, and participate in renewed modes of mourning by answering the question, “what are you grieving?” Join Eva Margarita as she sifts through language as a site for change, that is, a postcolonial history of loss that when unearthed, refuses to be forgotten. Obituary serves as a journey in memory, flesh, and the human need to accompany one another in life and in death. 

About Eva Margarita: Originally from South Central Los Angeles, Eva Margarita is an Afro-Latinx performance artist and scholar. Eva Margarita’s performance works explore conjure, ritual, and ceremourning while her critical writings investigate diasporic sociological haunting with the intention of unsettling colonial forms of gathering. As an artist, Eva Margarita is concerned with grief and wake work that allows us to accompany, blur lines, and spill all over each other. Her work is guided by the principle that practices of the rituals of everyday life offer an alternate way of existing; one that acknowledges the familial, spiritual, and scholarly forces available for layering logics of gathering. Her performances pull together immaterial and material resources to weaponize interdisciplinary ways of animating life. 

​Pronouns: She/Hers/Ella

Obituary is funded and supported in part by VORTEX Repertory Company.