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Laura Rodriguez

Contributing Artist 2016-2023

Dance and Technology artist and educator, Artistic Director Harvard Dance Project

Biography

LROD is a Chicana from El Paso and the Tex-Mex borderlands who actively create inclusive installations, surreal dance-works, and integrates emerging technology with care. Recognized as an interdisciplinary performance artist/choreographer; Laura’s current mediums intersect dance, performance, visual art, mask making, costume design, lighting, and interactive technologies. Her movement research investigates contemporary lineages of Latinidad in dance, alter-egoism, and discovering communal environments of radical tenderness. Her films explore Latinidad in the context of borderland cultural production through the lens of surrealism, futurity, and inter-generational archives. She is currently the Artistic Director of the Harvard Dance Project.

https://tdm.fas.harvard.edu/people/lrod

Q&A

What makes more livable futures for you?

For me, a pursuit to re-imagine justice, resiliency, and love against the current oppressive or destructive ways of living would be a start in making the future livable. I believe it is crucial to create a realm of care, ethics, and compassion to work towards balance in our overly consumptive world. These liberal acts help to reconstruct/heal dilapidated structures in our social, economic, and industrial ways of living but prioritize these acts within the environmental sphere. As an artist, I think creating performative/experiential environments in a community of co-creation kickstarts the imagination needed to unlock the potential of our future.

  • A livable future responds to crisis, injustice, and inequality.

  • A livable future is continuously adapting.

  • A livable future makes and holds space for all.

  • A livable future is a possibility manifested through imagination.

  • A livable future redefines freedom.

  • A livable future is not always polite.

  • A livable future is transparent.

  • A livable future thrives in equity.

  • A livable future redefines love and care.

What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017), Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2019) by adrienne maree brown

Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology by Jennifer A. González

Black Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (2009) edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley

Dawn (2012) by Octavia E. Butler

On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Ahmanson-Murphy Fine Arts Imprint) by Ronald Rael

What practices are sustaining you?

Sustaining my practice is daydreaming, hyper creativity in co-creative environments, performance as protest, and ritualized self-care.

  • Sun’s kiss on my skin

  • The desert

  • Aesthetics in environmental design

  • Home

  • Community

  • Daily improvisation

  • Mi Familia

  • Napping

  • Sustento

  • Artmaking in all its capacities

  • Deep conversations

  • Immersing into books/movies/shows

  • Truth

  • The moment when I am told something is impossible