For practically 40 years, Elia Arce has practiced and carried out from the borderline. Arce’s work toes the road between theatre and dance, prose and poetry, ritual and circumstance, nature and consequence. In dissolving these boundaries, Arce courts liminality, typically in pursuit of enlightenment, however oftentimes in direct opposition to a singular narrative. Her observe, at its core, is one in all emotional atomization; a foray into the kind of radical empathy that transcends the thoughts and is thus transferred to the physique. Arce has been the “crying Buddha” in A Mud of Gold, inviting the viewers to whisper their sorrows to her, one after the other, and in change, she “launched” them, sobbing profusely right into a wicker basket. She has been papered to the wall of DiverseWorks gallery for The Lengthy Rely II, rising slowly from her canvassed chrysalis over the course of 4 hours. She has been First Girl on the Moon, exhibiting the broad and assorted expertise of being “othered.” In a single act, she performed with a babydoll earlier than dressing it in crimson and locking it in a cage; in one other, she rigorously molded a child out of clay earlier than dropping it unceremoniously. Arce is eager on creating “residing monuments,” works which might be sculptural of their presence, but ephemeral of their lifespan. In No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt), the identical rules apply, however lengthen past Arce’s imaginative and prescient of the “residing monument” and culminate as a substitute in a lifelong effigy.
The primary flicker of No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt) arrived in Houston—a scene of which Arce has been a fixture for the previous thirty years—as an altar devoted to the Palestinians killed in Israel’s struggle on Hamas within the wake of the October 7 assaults. Arce invited Palestinian households residing within the metropolis to learn the names and ages of family members misplaced to the sanguinary battle and to put flowers of their reminiscence. Drawing from funerary traditions in Costa Rica, the place an altar made for one particular person typically evolves right into a web site of remembrance for all the neighborhood, Arce sought to foster an area of collective grieving.
“In Houston, the creative neighborhood got here to assist these households, and we have been all there to assist them,” Arce informed Observer when requested concerning the preliminary framework of the piece. “We created a protected house … the place we might mourn collectively. As an alternative of a person grief, it turned a neighborhood therapeutic.”
When No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt) arrived as a efficiency at Los Angeles’ REDCAT up to date arts middle on October 30, 2025; it had already been staged in Houston and New York Metropolis. In every metropolis, the efficiency was barely totally different—tailor-made to go well with a specific venue, viewers, temper—however the core parts have been unaltered. A determine shrouded in blue sits nonetheless and statuesque on the utmost nook of the stage. A practice from their shroud runs the size of the stage, and a lady toils at its finish, turning it over, folding it this fashion and that, making a bundle of material. She repeats the method so many occasions that the bundle, as soon as the dimensions of a watermelon, swells to the dimensions of a physique. As the girl on stage completes her solemn process and presents the bundle to the determine, arms emerge from the shroud to cradle it. In No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt), Arce isn’t the protagonist however a narrator, a practical Greek refrain, winnowing throughout the efficiency with laments and lullabies.
Earlier than the girl rolls up the shroud, Arce delivers the primary stanzas of her Spanish poem “grietas y fisuras,” (“cracks and fissures”) in a sonorous voice. The primary couplet reads, “The kid lastly wakes up / in his father’s arms.” In tandem with the folding ritual, the haunting preface reveals that the boy, who spends the period of his life as a funeral shroud, is “lastly” along with his father. As soon as the bundle has been made and the residing Pietà has been realized and carnations have been positioned, Arce returns to the stage to supply the ultimate chorus: “Cracks make means for cracks / Cracks fade with the sunshine that makes them out of date / That is how cracks make sure that in the long run, solely mild stays.”
Within the dialog organized by the Getty Analysis Institute’s Latin American and Latinx Artwork Initiative and curated by researcher Jasmine Magaña, Arce described the imagery out of Gaza she drew from: mass graves of our bodies wrapped in blue tarps exterior Al-Shifa hospital and mourning moms holding their kids’s limp our bodies. Seeing such photographs, Arce felt pissed off and helpless. No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt) was created as a negotiation, to therapeutic massage helplessness into catharsis. To make a monument out of bereavement.
Monuments ostensibly evoke a collective reminiscence, an id that’s each collaborative and inheritable. Each New Yorker who sees the Statue of Liberty and thinks, “I’m a New Yorker.” Each Roman who sees the Colosseum and thinks, “I’m a Roman.” Arce’s residing monuments reject such logic. They correspond to their very own tradition, they reaffirm their very own narrative, they adhere to their very own structure of humanity, incapable of being altered or othered. The enculturation of No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt) rests on a certainty in its personal semiotics, a stalwart perception that regardless of the viewers, grief needs to be collective, not singular.
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