Columbia Chronicle reporter Zoey Hill-Hernandez features the recent premiere of MATADORA. Columbia alum Camila Rivero Pooley, who goes by the artist name “INSÉKTA,” transformed her experiences with rage and gender expectations into a dance theater production that premiered this week at the Dance Center:
For Camila Rivero Pooley, a 2018 Columbia alum and the artist behind MATADORA, rage is not something to suppress. It is something that can be transformed.
‘I was always demonized,’ Rivero Pooley said. ‘I was made to feel like a monster when I was just denouncing things I felt were unfair.’
The hour-long dance theater production premiered Thursday, Sept. 24, at Columbia’s Dance Center, combining choreography, physical theater, lighting, sound, and body horror to explore feminine rage, identity, and transformation.
INSÉKTA describes MATADORA as a ‘spectacle of divine horrors.’
‘For me, MATADORA is like a new archetype with the understanding that rage is a source of power and self-possession,’ she said.
The production follows a creature-like figure through a mythological journey involving rage, the psyche, misogyny, and machismo. Throughout the performance, the dancers shift between human and monstrous forms, using their bodies to explore what anger can become when it’s no longer treated as something that should be hidden.
The idea came from INSÉKTA’s own experiences with anger and gender expectations. Born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, she said she was often made to feel her anger was something that made her a ‘monster.’
Through MATADORA, INSÉKTA said she wanted to create an archetype that could resonate with women and gender-diverse people while embracing the complexity of emotions that are often suppressed.
The production’s grotesque imagery developed alongside that exploration…
