estrellx supernova
Brooklyn, NY
estrellx supernova (they/them, formerly known as randy reyes) is a queer, Afro-Guatemalan choreographer, performance artist, brujx, and healer born in New Jersey (Lenape territory) and now based and making love and art in the San Francisco Bay Area (Ramaytush Ohlone territory). supernova is interested in choreography as a process of excavation, task as meditation, psychosomatic work (working directly with grief, joy, rage, and praise), Chinese Energetics, and getting messy by conjuring contemporary rituals within quotidian and natural landscapes. supernova explores the notion of club spaces as sites of generative dissonance and asks, “Are we celebrating or mourning or both? How do we prepare for the not yet seen?” questions directly inspired by their time listening and exchanging with Jeanne van Heeswijk, Rick Lowe, and Tania Bruguera while they were a Creative Dissent Fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts during the summer of 2017. Their practice and choreographic platform integrates ecology (as it relates to trauma, healing, the environment, perception, spirituality, BIQTPOC identity); choreography (that uses contemporary dance, structured improvisation, somatic, and ritual-based forms); and socially-engaged praxis (that bridges movement research to broader communities, fields, and discourses through performance). supernova frames performance as transmission and as acts or offerings of radical reciprocity, generosity, vulnerability, and love. In 2019, supernova was awarded a National Association of Latino Arts & Culture Artist Grant, a Dancers’ Group CA$H Grant, an Impulstanz | danceWEB scholarship, a Princess Grace in Choreography Fellowship Award, and was selected as a Choreography in Mentorship Exchange Mentee to work with mentor, Margaret Jenkins. supernova currently co-directs two performance collectives in the Bay called LXS DXS and the BIQTPOC Performing Artist Hive.
Photo: Ariel Appel
c performs death by disco, part 1. Photo: Yvonne Portra.
Still of estrellx supernova performing death by disco, part 2. Photo: Yvonne Portra.
estrellx supernova performs death by disco, prelude. Photo: joseeabad
Photo: Williams College Photography.
estrellx supernova performs another iteration of not the same old thing or u.u.u.
estrellx supernova nothing ever stays white for too long (or yearning cycle #2)
Co-Founder & Co-Director of the BIQTPOC Performing Artist Hive. Photo credit: Dongyi Wu.
Encuentro 33: LINE/AGE | Queer Neuro-Cognitive Architectures Hidden in Plain Site(s)
estrellx supernova is a queer Afro-Guatemalan brujx-choreographer who implements choreographic structures in service of activating their interests in ecology, choreography, and socially-engaged praxis.
Artist BioEncuentro 33 is a multiphase project created in partnership with an emergent core group of Black, Indigenous, First-Generation, Queer, Trans Artists of Color within and outside of Turtle Island, or the United States. Through this project, the group comes together to instigate a series of performance and ritual-based actions that excavate ecology, ancestry, pleasure, healing, and socially-engaged praxis through a choreographic lens. These works provide infrastructure for bringing estrella/x’s vision of opening La Escuela de Cariño, Corporealidad y Artes Sutiles/The School of Tenderness, Embodied Kinetics, & Alchemical Arts to fruition. La Escuela is a multidimensional shape-shifting space that takes the form of a queer club, healing center, choreographic innovation research incubator, performance venue, and farm designed by and in service to Black, Indigenous, Queer Trans, People of Culture (BIQTPOC) and allies, and will reflect the wisdom and intelligence of our plasticity, resonance, and cosmic frequencies. La Escuela centers the voices of BIQTPOC survivors, artists, activists, healers, herbalists, innovators, and creative thinkers and aims to become a main hub where we can co-create alternative realities, infrastructure, economies, and paradigms that serve our individual and collective liberation. La Escuela will divest from what no longer serves, will be intercultural, international, and interdisciplinary in scope, and will make the impossible, possible, the invisible, visible. The group will learn through stillness, slowing down, rigorous embodiment, somatics, and attending to our wounds, inner children, and wildest dreams.