For If I Can’t Dance’s Edition VI – Event and Duration (2015–2016), Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa has been commissioned to produce a cycle of new performance works.

Through these performances, Ramírez-Figueroa will attempt to exhaust his interest in the Guatemalan Civil War as the recurring subject of his work. Waged from 1960 to 1996, the Guatemalan Civil War was fought between the government of Guatemala and leftist rebel groups who were supported by ethnic Mayan indigenous people and Ladino peasants, and is infamous for the genocide against the Mayan population and for widespread human rights violations against civilians.

Across punctuated moments through out the Edition, Ramírez-Figueroa will use his body and direct action to perform a series of images related to the history of the Guatemalan Civil War. Through this, Ramírez-Figueroa will approach the Civil War from a personal position, often softening it through abstraction and humour, while attempting through the intensity of the performance schedule to push beyond the force of the collective and inscribed memory of its history. At the cycle’s conclusion, the performances will form a series of “images” that will come together as some kind of whole.

Ramírez-Figueroa’s new work is commissioned and produced as part of Corpus, network for performance practice. Corpus is Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao), CAC (Vilnius), KW (Berlin), If I Can’t Dance (Amsterdam), Playground (STUK & M, Leuven), and Tate Modern (London) – www.corpus-network.org. Corpus is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.