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

Estrellx (they/them) is an Afro-Guatemalan-American choreographer, performer, curator, creative producer, and writer.

Artist Bio

Encuentro 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.

Discipline
Dance, Social Practice
Award Year
2020
Status

In Progress

Themes

2021 Artist Retreat Presentation

A brown-skinned person standing wearing a black leather jacket and white t-shirt underneath, smiles slightly. They stand under a light purple red hued light and look forward past the camera prepared, confident, and ready to take their next step. In the upper right hand corner, there is a greenish white light that is part of the video shoot set.

Estrellx Supernova

Brooklyn, NY

Estrellx (they/them) is an Afro-Guatemalan-American choreographer, performer, curator, creative producer, and writer. Their performance alias, EHQS, is the root component of their macro-vision called The Universe of Rhizomatic Tenderness (TUoRT), an emerging ecosystem designed to somatically empower and uplift Queer and Trans Creatives of the Global Majority through healing-based social choreographies. Since 2022, Estrellx has co-produced and co-facilitated the initial iterations of RHIZOMATICA, healing-based performance labs, in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and virtually.

Choreographically, Estrellx integrates club spaces as sites of generative dissonance, as sites for their embodied unraveling and integration. Estrellx insists on asking, “Are we celebrating or mourning or both? What do you really want and how exactly do you want it? How can the notion of quantum entanglement support us with co-creating erotically potent futures? What do we do with the legacies we have inherited?” Estrellx implements Qi Energetic principles, divination, opacity, systems of improvisation, contemporary and club dance forms, sonic scripts, and eco-drag into their ritualistic performative language.

Estrellx has choreographed several solo and collaborative works including: The Hanged Them (Ateneum Museum, 2023), Animate, Intimate (Cycle 1): Points of Encounter (Culturgest, 2023), Real Talk #2: VERSE (Center for Performance Research, 2022), amongst others. Estrellx is currently distilling their choreo-somatic research into a tarot deck called El Tarot de Quebrantamiento, which they are aiming to publish by Fall 2025.

Estrellx has received a New Jersey Individual Artist Fellowship Award (2023), Djerassi Residency (2022), Creative Capital Award (2020), San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Individual Artist Grant (2019), a Princess Grace in Choreography Award (2019), and more.

Photo: Ariel Appel