Victoria Eugenia Santa Cruz Gamarra

Descripción del Artista

Fue compositora, coreógrafa, diseñadora e investigadora de las culturas de raíz africana, exponente del arte afroperuano. In 1922 Victoria Santa Cruz was born in Lima as the eighth of ten children in a family of black artists, musicians, and intellectuals. Santa Cruz's mother taught young Victoria marinera and other criollo dances. Her father, raised during his adolescence in the United States, shared his knowledge of European classical music and the works of Shakespeare. In 1958, together with her younger brother Nicomedes, she cofounded the first black theater company in Peru, Cumanana, which she codirected until 1961. The three-act musical play Malató (1961)—which she wrote, choreographed, and staged—revealed "the historically prevalent intimate relations between slave and master that were omitted from the official history of Peruvian haciendas and biological mestizaje."# It also sought to reconstruct nearly forgotten black religious practices. During her time with Cumanana, Santa Cruz began to develop her pedagogical method of self-discovery and recuperation of culture based on internal rhythm and what she called ancestral memory.# Her lifelong aim was to awaken black consciousness and pride in Peru. Between 1961 and 1965 she studied theater and choreography in Paris at the Université du Théâtre des Nations and École Supérieur des Études Chorégraphiques with such distinguished professors as the actor Jean-Louis Barrault, the playwright Eugène Ionesco, and the choreographer Maurice Béjart. While in France she also became a sought-after costume designer, visited Africa for the first time, and staged the ballet La muñeca negra (The black doll, ca. 1965). On her return to Peru in 1966, she founded the group Teatro y Danzas Negras del Perú, which performed in Lima and on Peruvian television and toured internationally, including at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. During the late 1960s Santa Cruz re-created such seminal Afro-Peruvian dance forms as landó and zamacueca. In 1969, under the self-proclaimed Revolutionary Government of the Peruvian Military Forces, she was appointed director of the newly established Escuela Nacional de Folklore, and in 1973 she became director of the Conjunto Nacional de Folklore. In the 1970s the company toured extensively throughout Latin America, the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Santa Cruz also published the magazine Folklore and wrote extensively. When the company disbanded in 1982, she took a position as a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She was eventually awarded tenure and taught there until her retirement in 1999. She died in 2014 in Lima and, in recognition of her contributions, was laid in state at the Museo de la Nación there. —Dorota Bizcel

Exposiciones en las que ha participado como artista

Une avant-garde féministe des années 1970

Colectiva

And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?

Colectiva

I Am: New Afro-Latinx Narratives

Colectiva

8 exposiciones colectivas