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Cacao | A Venezuelan Lament is a new live performance work about belonging, land, and the preservation of traditions. Drawing on twelve years of community-based fieldwork, this polylingual and multidisciplinary dance and theater production offers timely insight into the complex lived realities of Venezuela’s cacao farmers as they fight to keep their way of life amidst the pressures of neoliberal globalization. Creator, Director, and Choreographer Victoria Mata brings these stories to life through a vocabulary and aesthetics rooted in the tensions between remembering and forgetting, and in a dynamic dialogue between Afro-Venezuelan genres and contemporary expressions of dance and music.

Premiering September 22-25 in Toronto, Canada, Cacao | A Venezuelan Lament  will immerse audiences in a celebration of life, culture, and of love through an intimate journey into the radiant resilience and untethered jubilation that are the heart of Venezuela’s cacao farming communities.