Points of Passage

Yusimi Moya Rodriguez created the solo dance piece "Points of Passage" which premiered at the Garden Pavilion of Melk Abbey in Austria in 2014. The baroque frescoes on the wall and ceiling, painted by Johann Bergl in 1763, show an exotic depiction of colonial landscapes. An entire room is devoted to the discovery of the Americas and shows strange plants, wild creatures and indigenous people.

Since Columbus landed on Cuba and is featured with his landing fleet in the fresco, European dreams of the foreign worlds are at the center of attention. Yusimi Moya Rodriguez moved to Europe from Cuba. She added her experience as someone having travelled in the opposite direction to this conceptual piece, using the Cuban dance vocabulary at this site to tell her story of migration and identity in the different surroundings. The performance is about imaginations and dreams of the Other, reflected from both ways.

Collaborator Christian Martinek is an Austrian composer and musician of Venezuelan descent. He grew up with South American music and studied piano on the University of Music in Vienna. He has a profound knowledge of ritual drumming from West Africa, the Caribbean, South America and India.

The dance piece was developed for the arts program at the Melk Abbey in Austria. Contemporary visual arts, dance, film and literature were exhibited at the baroque monastery during 2014. A video recording of the dance remains permanently on display at the Garden Pavilion and a book about the arts program has been published.

The video was also shown in the group exhibition “Somewhere in the World. Afrikanisch-niederösterreichische Begegnungen“ curated by Elisabeth Voggeneder and Dieter Ronte at the Forum Frohner, Kunstmeile Krems, Austria, in 2020. The exhibition presented Black artists working in Austria.