Ellas y Yo: Mexicanas

Choreographed by Silvita Diaz Brown, Presented as a featured offering of CLATA’s Destinos Festival, in

partnership with the Physical Theater Festival Chicago

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Ellas y Yo: Mexicanas is a full-length dance-theatre triptych that physically embodies the legacies of Mexican women artists who forged creative freedom while navigating colonial, religious, and patriarchal constraints across centuries. Developed over the past four years, the work centers on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Frida Kahlo, and myself, a contemporary Mexican immigrant artist living and working in the United States.

As a Mexican immigrant artist, this project began from a desire to enter the physical and emotional worlds of historic Mexican women whose uncompromising artistic practices challenged dominant power structures. Through archival research and movement investigation, I embodied the lives and creative struggles of Sor Juana and Frida, then returned to my own body to examine how their histories reshape my movement vocabulary, identity, and artistic voice. The final section, Ellas y Yo: Silvita, situates my lived experience within an ongoing lineage of Mexican women who use creativity as survival, resistance, and liberation.

Each section carries a distinct physical and theatrical language. Sor Juana’s intellectual precision and spiritual rebellion are explored through choreography developed with the nun’s habit, a garment that both confined her and enabled her freedom to write. Frida Kahlo’s transformation of pain into radical self-expression informs a visceral, intimate, and surreal physical world. In Frida’s choreography, long skirts extend the body, referencing how she covered her shorter leg and how the garment became inseparable from her identity and movement. The Silvita section explores migration, grief, and belonging, revealing dance as a site of healing and agency.

Performed by six dancers embodying these women, the work unfolds in three interconnected sections—Sor Juana, Frida, and Silvita—through solos, duets, trios, and ensemble moments. Contemporary dance, physical theater, bilingual text (Spanish/English), original music, and multimedia projection create a layered theatrical experience.

 

Silvita Diaz Brown

Silvita Diaz Brown is a Mexican-American choreographer, dancer, and movement educator based in Chicago since 2008. She is the founder and artistic director of Sildance/AcroDanza, creating multidisciplinary works that blend contemporary dance, acroyoga, circus, and physical theater to explore identity, migration, memory, and human connection.

Her work has been commissioned, presented, and supported by organizations including DCASE, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, See Chicago Dance, Ballet 5:8, Momenta Dance, the National Museum of Mexican Art, Links Hall, Chicago Night Out in The Parks, and the Chicago Cultural Center. She has danced and presented work throughout the United States, Mexico, Canada, Cuba, Spain, Egypt, and India.

A 2025 Body Passages Artist-in-Residence at Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble and a 2026 and 2022 Ragdale Artist-in-Residence, she is also a recipient of the Made in Chicago Residency, culminating in the premiere of Ellas y Yo: Mexicanas. Ellas y Yo is her most ambitious and deeply personal work to date, representing the culmination of four years of research, creation, and collaboration.

She holds a BFA in Dance from Universidad de las Américas Puebla (Mexico) and an MFA in Theatre with a specialization in Movement from York University (Canada).

Inspired by her journey as a Mexican woman who left her country in search of her own voice and identity, Silvita creates movement as a language of transformation, belonging, and healing. Through Ellas y Yo: Mexicanas and her broader body of work, she invites audiences to embrace the complexity of heritage, culture, and self, inspiring deeper empathy and connection across communities.
 

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