Bitter Pineapples (Screening)

IN MY OWN WORDS

‘My land / my house / my grand mother / her food / myself waiting for her / my brother - recriminations / my homosexuality / a river of blood…’

… just a few of the words that Mexican dancer Gabriel Galvez-Prado uses to describe his feelings for Mexico.

IN ANNA's WORDS

My name is Anna Cady and i’m an artist who often works in collaboration with people who have something important to share. (I have worked with the dying, people who are physically profoundly disabled, and Gabriel with PTS)

For the last few years I have been working with Gabriel Galvez-Prado - a Mexican dancer who experienced trauma in Mexico throughout his childhood (multiple murders and abuse of himself and the women in his family). I’m not a therapist, though in some ways I have been a therapist for him over the past years, just listening, - he has had his own dance therapist in London, quite separately.

Anyway. Together we’ve made a film.

It has premiered at the Hansard Gallery in Southampton (http://www.city-eye.co.uk/bitter-pineapples-screening-and-conversation.html) and the next screening, together with Q&A (with both G and myself) will be as part of the Stroud Film Festival on Weds 20th at 8pm at the Museum in the Park On the 23rd it will be in Southampton again at an Arts for Well Being day.

TESTIMONIES:

"Your film was a triumph of collaboration and empathy. It will stay with me for the rest of my life."

Love, Jacqui

"The film you showed last night were beautiful, catching raw subjects with gentility and integrity. I feel it would be a wonderful tool to help people explore traumatic experiences."

Thanks, Jemima

ABOUT GABRIEL

Gabriel is trained in Contemporary Japanese Dance (Butoh) and Somatic dance techniques, both of which enable one to express one’s deeper, even unconscious, feelings through movement. Combining this line of creativity with film – where the process is generally much more prescriptive – has been an exciting challenge.

Gabriel lives and works in Southampton, where, as well as performing and teaching he holds movement classes for older people and those with Parkinsons disease.

ABOUT ANNA

Anna Cady has screened and installed films both nationally and internationally - including Tate Modern. Her animated documentary 30% (Women and Politics in Sierra Leone) won Best Film award at Southampton Film Week and went on to be selected for the Sundance Film Festival in 2013, and a Vimeo ‘Staff Pick’. Installations of her work include Mottisfont (NT), and more recently at Tremenheere Sculpture Park within the James Turrell Skyspace.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Sol Cafe, 54-57 Allison Street, Birmingham, United Kingdom