Quieridos,

The Piñata Dance Collective is counting down to our show on Sunday May 4 and my residency in Mexico begins after my papa turns 80 next week!  Dale!

I have been working with the most generous and artistically engaged people for this Benefit on Sunday. I am hoping to reach my goal in order to give them a monetary offering, so if you can donate before our cut-off date on Monday, please do!

Here is the link to my Indiegogo campaign Help Liz Dance in Mexico!

Thank you to all of you who have already supported this journey~ See you at the show! It’s going to be amazing!

5/4 4pm Shawl Anderson Dance Center. $5-$50 sliding scale donation.

Muchisimas Gracias y Abrazos~

Hola quieridos y amores!

We have a few more days to prepare for the Benefit Piñata Dance Ritual this Sunday May 4 and wrap up the Indiegogo campaign by May 5!  There is still time for you to support the artists of the Piñata Dance Collective and my journey to 360 Xochi Quetzal! Check out the campaign video here: http://igg.me/at/Pinata360/x/6875443     

&    come to our delicious show this Sunday! https://www.facebook.com/events/1422754151311739/

You will be brought into an experimental taste of Piñata metaphores, and gifted with a culturally diverse offering of dance and music celebrating and honoring the rich history of our beloved Piñata. 

Tickets are $5- $50 sliding scale. Purchase at the door by cash, check or credit card.

To listen to my radio interview on La Raza Chronicles KPFA 94.1FM click here! https://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/102177 (I’m toward the end, 48 min. into it. 🙂

Dear community,

I am so grateful for those of you who have contributed to our upcoming Piñata Dance Collective Benefit and my month-long residency in Mexico. Support Liz’s fundraising campaign on Indiegogo! http://igg.me/at/Pinata360/x/6875443 I want you to know that I have only 2 weeks left to reach my goal and still $2400 left to raise.  I think we can do it!!!  Please consider offering even $1 to the cause… ALL contributions count and they help build recognition especially if you us the Share tools!

Speaking of recognition… listen to my interview on La Raza Chronicles with Nina Serrano on KPFA 94.1FM  this Tuesday April 22nd at 7pm!  https://www.kpfa.org/la-raza-chronicles

More great news! In addition to our May 4th showing at Shawl Anderson, I am simultaneously choreographing a Piñata dance for Cal State East Bay’s Inclusive Interdisciplinary Dance Ensemble to be performed on May 9, 10 at CSUEB Hayward.  I have a group of 7 students all from different departments, some of whom have never taken dance classes before.   I’ve been asking them questions like what do you want to breakthrough or release in your life right now? Given the history of the Piñata, how can we use its metaphors of creation, destruction and regeneration to support our personal life themes of loss of loved ones, body image, heart break, and cultural identity?  These are some of the themes they are working with and it is an honor to offer an art-based container that provides the community and self-reflection they need, as well as, the embodiment and creative release of trauma.

Also, note, there is one more TEMENOS mini-workshop for women on May 3rd 1-4pm at Monkey Yoga Shala in Oakland.  The groups have been regenerative and very powerful so far and I look forward to our last meeting before I take off for Mexico.  Please rsvp at chuprosadancing@gmail.com

If you are interested in dance classes, I am teaching Beg.II/Int. Modern Dance on Monday mornings 10am-11:30 until May 5th.  ***Then the class will end due to a new youth summer dance schedule.
However, I will still be teaching on-going Int./Adv. Modern Dance on Fridays 11:30-1pm now and when I return from Mexico. (I’m away May 9-June 9 ) Click here for Liz’s on-going dance classes at Shawl Anderson: https://lizboubion.org/?page_id=544

You’re Invited to the Benefit Piñata Dance Ritual on Sunday, May 4, 4pm!

Click here to register for TEMENOS with Liz on May 3rd! https://lizboubion.org/?page_id=502

Clay vessel with feathers- Hawk, vulture, turkey and pheasant. By Liz Boubion and Sculptor, Meryl Juniper

BRAVISIMA!!! I WAS ACCEPTED out of 160 international applicants for a month-long Spring residency in Mexico called 360 XOCHI QUETZAL.  !*!*!   Come share my excitement by participating in a re-interpreted Piñata ritual to send me off in style! See new choreography, improvisational scores and excerpts of Piñata Dances on May 4, 4pm at Shawl Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, Ca.

Tickets are $5-50+sliding scale at the door- Donations will help fund my travel expenses, new video technology to document and edit my work, pay collaborators of the Piñata Dance Collective. and my rent in Oakland while I am not working in the U.S.  Please see my Donations page and more details if you are able to donate today!

***My goal is to raise $4000 (its tax deductible through my fiscal sponsor). Muchisimas Gracias para su generosidad~

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TEMENOS has begun! A Movement Practice for Women Identified people (transgendered people welcome).

(“Temenos” is a Greek word C.J. Jung used to describe a safe and sacred space to explore the unconscious and create.)

We had a beautiful first session carving out time and space to drop into the body, play and connect with interdisciplinary art forms in a community of women.  This work is based on the Tamalpa Life-Art Process, Somatics, and Mindfulness practices. ***No experience necessary ***Class is donation based See More…

There are 2 more classes left before I leave for Mexico, and they are filling up, so please register today! or JOIN TEMENOS on FaceBook

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Photo Credit: Matt Haber

Intermediate/Advanced Modern Technique 2 for 1 Special continues!  Take advantage of the 2-1 special for 2 more weeks! We are having a blast every Friday morning at 11:30am-1pm at Shawl Anderson in Berkeley! The class is starting to feel solid and robust with returning regulars !          Vamanos!

See details…

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March 6, 7:30pm Curated by Laura Inserra and Samavesha... This event “Creative Celebrations Show” will promise to be a musical feast with inspiring multi-genre exhibitions.  I will be dancing a 5 minute solo in the path of the Labyrinth with accompaniment by Laura Inserra on the Hang with dream-like meditative melodies. ***Pay by Donation***

This is a fundraising show to support the 4th annual Art in Nature Festival in the Oakland Regional Park steam trail in October.

Assignment for Professor, Afia Walking Tree, M.Ed.
Spring Semester 2013
Course: Indigenous Wisdom, Holy Names University, Sophia Center

I was the seventh born child.  My mother said “Please dear God, not another one!” It was 1971 and abortions were introduced in clinics, yet her Catholicism kept her from aborting me.  I was a pro–life child.

My father used to take me on walks to feed my brain….”  Make sure you marry a man who is kind and generous, who comes from a good family and who is healthy—it’s very important that they are healthy!”

Mi papa, Octavio Duran Boubion otherwise known as “Dio” to his intimates was plucked out of the barrio of Boyle Heights in L.A. at age 14 by Father Servedo.  “Do you want to become a priest?  Father Servedo asked when Dio visited his best friend Ed at the seminary in Dominguez Hills.  “Oh yes!” He said when he saw how beautiful the seminary grounds were, how good the food was, how safe he felt in the company of priests.

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Suddenly, I have a blog! Why didn’t I start this before?  Beinvenidos!

PIÑATA 2012! Choreographed Disasters and Natural Events- Its 2012 and we are entering a new age.  Our inheritance of global warming, modernization, post-colonial memory loss, capitalism, consumerism and on and on… is tugging at our sleeves undeniably calling for our attention to change and lift the blindfold off.  As a dance artist and expressive arts movement coach,  I have been developing a movement based on the historical, literal, and metaphoric ritual of the Piñata. As a mixed race Chicana, I identify with her mixed race identity- claimed by numerous countries as their own.

The Piñata spins and flaps in the wind all over the world, in cities and backyards, claiming space for ART like a country flag.  She has been traveling over continents and across borders for centuries and has stayed alive and beautiful no matter how many times people appropriate her, smash her, and take all of her insides. She is immortal.  She celebrates birth… and she holds prayers for sustainability- as the Aztecs prayed into their clay pot vessel.  She reminds us to play, to trust, and not to loose our aim. (dale dale dale no pierdas el tino!) She reminds us that we, ourselves, are impermanent works of art, and that each one of us is filled with nourishing goodness.  In essence, she is a symbol of life, death and creativity itself.

Piñata 2012 has been an ongoing re-construction of the Pinata Ritual from various points of view in honor of the ending of the Mayan Synchronometer.  As a budding permaculturist, and as a member of “Walking Tree Essentials” gardening and a part of Green Valley Village CSA farm,  I am wanting to align my life more and more in sync with nature and the cosmos rather than the colonialists imposed sense of time called the “Calendar”- based off of the money paid into the governement every month.  We are undergoing tremendous change, and each person has their own target.

An apocalypse (Ancient Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apocálypsis, from ἀπό and καλύπτω meaning ‘un-covering’), translated literally from Greek refers to a revelation or unveiling of something hidden…In religious contexts it is usually a revelation of hidden meaning – hidden from human knowledge in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception.

Last Friday night Nov. 16, 2012, at Kunst-Stoff Arts in San Francisco we presented a Piñata Breakthrough Performance Ritual that was performed by workshop participants: Shoshana Greene, Maica Folch, Sharon Sato, Titine Vos, Amy Hougan and musicians Evelie Sales Posch and Jacob Johnson as well as installed video projections by Afia Walking Tree and a live ice melting sculpture by environmental artist Carter Brooks.  It was directed by yours truly.  It was fascinating to hold myself back from dancing in my own piece for the first time ever… this is something I have wanted to try for quite some time.  I was able to see and feel in quite a new way. I apologize to those of you who came to see me perform…but I am still recovering from a few bodily injuries and I was too busy producing to get into the studio.

Piñata, I think we are on to something…. comments from audience were surprisingly “genderized”… in that men felt that the blindfolded sensory walk and performance was very feminine and nuturing… even “motherly”… which I mistakenly thought it had nothing to do with gender and more based off  zen mind and finding presence through the senses….And the piñata breaking at the end was very male dominated according to some women.  One woman didn’t want to come to the show because she didn’t like the idea of “hitting”.  And I thought the piñata was a pregnant thing wanting to birth and bust open….So, now I am fascinated with the spectrum of experience that was presented in this format and I am dying to do it again.

I found last Friday to be part of the revelation and a revolution that we are part of that has to do with restoring humanity in an apocalyptic era.  Re-Sensitizing our machine dominated world from the personal revelation to the planetary revolution… And bringing back in balance the feminine and masculine energy on the planet.  To enter a public space blindfolded with a sighted guide through a wonderworld of sounds, tastes, smells and tactile stimuli…then to witness a private act of women performing raw and undeveloped material of “breaking through” and unveiling the predominant paradigm for themselves…and finally to undergo your own witnessed “breakthrough moment” when putting your unveiled intention into every wack of that community ritual called “Piñata” is a subversive act of balance.

As an artist, I feel amongst billions of women who are doing invisible work in the world… and I wonder how visible this project will become. I can imagine creating a Piñata ceremony every winter Solstice as my ancestors did to call back the sun and pray for 52 more years of life.  I have a feeling we will be needing to beg mercy from our Sun in years to come… the ice is melting and things are getting hot.