Productive body, body in movement, collective body. Effort, fatigue, sweat. Migration, exploitation, subversion. Self-recognition, rebellious enjoyment. These are concepts that permeate the work of Malvin Starlin Montero Frías, also known as Puerca de Goma (Rubber Pig). Forced labor in contemporary societies and the romanticization of mixed race in the Caribbean are central themes of his research and performances, in which the urgency of movement becomes radical political action. Malvin makes the body a territory and a bridge between collective memory and social transformation. On the occasion of the premiere of Arró con Mango at the Antic Teatre in Barcelona, ​​we interviewed this Afro-Caribbean diaspora artist who has lived and worked in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Spain.

Throughout your career, you’ve worked in important institutions, such as the Teatro Real in Madrid and the Teatro de la Zarzuela, as well as in more experimental, community, and activist spaces. Could you tell us a bit about how you began and about your time in Spain?

I started in the Dominican Republic at a dance conservatory, with a lot of need for movement. I also did a lot of urban dance, including Jerk and something called Che, in the Cocolo style. Later, while specializing in classical ballet, I arrived in Spain and my goal was to join a company. When I auditioned, however, I realized that, even if I danced well or followed what the choreographer was saying, my passport didn’t pass, or things would happen that my body didn’t yet understand. When I came to Spain (after a period in Cuba), I studied choreography and dance interpretation at the Rey Juan Carlos University. The social and artistic aspects began to merge. I myself am an example of social dance projects, since I come from a poor neighborhood in the Dominican Republic, Los Mina, in Santo Domingo. Here I began to explore other spaces of thought, such as Afro dance with the Ayllu collective, Matadero residencies, and La Parcería. I also spent time in Vallecas, and that’s where the ZebraPrieta platform emerged.

ZebraPrieta is a project focused on the pedagogical and collective aspects of dance. As a learning space where multiple subjectivities and trajectories converge, what role does free improvisation play in these contexts?

The platform features several creators, such as Jean Pierre Ozuna, Diana Nkogo, Lady Dyabla, and Lluvia Marchena, and we often have jams called La Puerca Jam in which many people come together to improvise, talk, and discuss their own material and work. My idea of ​​improvisation has been greatly influenced by my time working with the Farmacia 13 and its Multidisciplinary Free Improvisation Orchestra, established by the Galician composer Chefa Alonso. Later, we met Barry Harris, Charlie Parker’s pianist. In my methodology, I like to call it “exercises in absolute improvisation.” You take all the materials and play with them and with the people who are defending them. It’s a way of working that I feel is more complex than simply repeating a choreography.

Edouard Glissant developed the idea of ​​the “archipelago,” inspired by the fragmented geography of the Caribbean itself, as a form of resistance to colonial universalism. A series of interconnected islands that engage in dialogue without losing their uniqueness. How does your work relate to the idea of ​​the body as a site of memory and resistance?

I like to call it “body propaganda.” Afro-descendant and Indigenous knowledge is most powerful as a direct response to oppression. In my latest piece, Vinicinicinimi, An Asset Management Firm, I dance to a speech by Margaret Thatcher with a Gos, as the rise of Thatcherite neoliberalism curiously coincides with that of reggaeton. Translating all this to the Dominican context, it also merges with the Black transculturation of Rara, Gagá, and Voodoo. In other words, just as job insecurity grew, so did reggaeton. I like to think of it as a colonial delirium in the time of the Iron Lady, or as a celebration of atrocities. Another input for the work was the precariousness of sugarcane farmers in the Dominican Republic, who are currently exploited in semi-slave conditions and who produce very cheap sugar to be purchased by European countries. For example, my grandfather worked there, as did so many other people, without any benefits.

Racial divisions of labor and contemporary slavery are issues that constantly appear in your work. The narrative that migrants are not welcome is becoming increasingly established, and if we are, it’s only as long as we are “good migrants,” conditioned to fulfill a role in the structure of capitalist production and reproduction, that is, domesticated and productive. From your experience as an immigrant, how do you use dance to subvert this narrative of submission? 

I like to call myself many names and one of them is “your nanny’s son,” the son of your maid who’s back for revenge. In a physical way and with bodily action, I play a lot in my work with fatigue, sweat, and also with domesticity. When I arrived here, with the racial distribution of labor, I saw who the people are who work and what types of services they provide. I position myself within the privilege I currently have, of dancing and making community art, because otherwise I would be carrying sacks of grapefruit.

Who is destined to suffer? Who are the people condemned to be servants? Also, with the distribution of care, when I say I am “your nanny’s son,” I mean it in a real way, because my mother was a nanny and I had to be one when I was a child. My work tries to put this knowledge front and center and to not be the immigrant who comes here just to work, behave well, and not have an opinion. What if I want to drink beer? I can’t drink beer because a good immigrant doesn’t do that? In contrast, there’s an image of English and Germans tourists, who do whatever they want (without any explanation needed). Our bodies, however, are supposed to be clean, quiet, and to be a good (legal) immigrant.

All these questions relate to your piece El mal comío no piensa, no tiene dolor (Hungry People Don’t Think and Have No Pain). Where does this name come from?

El malcomío no piensa (Hungry People Don’t Think) is a saying in the Dominican Republic that means that someone who doesn’t eat well doesn’t think well. I use it to talk about how poor people, precarious people, white and non-white, are suffering from anti-human, fascist ideologies of anti-people, people who aim to kill you. El malcomío no piensa was a tribute to Monkey Black, a Dominican musician and pioneer of the urban rhythm Dembow, who emigrated to Barcelona and was murdered in the city in a brawl with gypsies. The police didn’t care and his body was only found much later. I began to reflect about how people are treated, about the real usefulness of the rule of law. These questions led me to the point I’m at now. My goal isn’t so much to make a work that addresses a specific theme, but rather to establish a methodology. By bringing together many issues, actions, and, above all, materials that emerge from the street, we can create an artistic action.

You’ve carried out several street interventions, such as those in the Atochares settlements or in the countryside of Almería. What are the implications of working outside of theaters and from the margins?

I embrace doubt a lot, the ability to question the things we believe. I took to the streets because no theater would let me in. It’s also true that I’ve marginalized my work a lot on a political level, but my first impulse was this: they don’t want my ideas, just my body to play the role of white savior. So I took to the streets. I started asking myself questions: What kind of bodies are we used to seeing in public spaces and what do they do? How about in the performing arts? What happens if I put this kind of proposal in a place where no one cares beforehand? The challenge is for someone to approach and to at least create friction and even rejection, because in theaters there’s no longer any rejection. In the end, a work of movement is not just a presentation but also a process. I did these in slums and in greenhouses, and also when my friend and I wandered through the streets of El Raval to compose a section of Arró con mango, making brief interventions so the police wouldn’t come. The important thing is to contextualize, to put the body on the street, to consider how and what to do.

The piece Arró con Mango  will soon premiere at the Antic Teatre in Barcelona, ​​a work that engages with the queer body, blackness, and intra-community tensions. What is the origin of this piece? How does it engage with the context of Barcelona, ​​a city where the narrative of multiculturalism and diversity has coexisted for decades with deep structural racism?

Arró con mango isn’t really “rice with mango”, it’s not something to be eaten, it’s an expression used in some Caribbean territories to talk about the strange, the incomprehensible, the contradictory. I also draw on it from my corporeality. I am arró con mango because I don’t feel like a man or a woman, I don’t subscribe to that kind of gender. You can call me whatever you want, but I’m not the black man you invented for yourself, I am arró con mango, full of contradictions. Also, one of the first impulses for the research was the Ibero-American Summit, which I like to call “the hunger summit,” because if it’s an Ibero-American summit and everyone goes there to talk about human rights, it can’t be anything other than an arró con mango. In this piece, I play with satire and use the current media bombardment, information-saturation, as a reference, which is yet another arró con mango.

My methodology comes from Afro-Caribbean knowledge. I also sing mambo and criticize Rosalía. Rosalía went to the Dominican Republic to do a featuring with a legendary mambo musician, but in the end she cut him from the featuring and kept the song for herself. So I play a mambo and talk about Tolete as a symbol of resistance, a person who, during the US intervention in the Dominican Republic, ended up rebelling against the status quo. It’s a story that has been lost but I would like to recover it to analyze, through performance, the protagonists of the city. In Barcelona, ​​a while back, you would look at a person and say, “Oh, that’s so-and-so,” and now you see police cars, tourists, Ibero-American summits, or ultras lynching people.

Featured image and  above these lines courtesy Malvin Starlin Montero Frías and Antic Teatre Barcelona

Arró con Mango can be seen on October 2, 3, 4, and 5 at the Antic Teatre de Barcelona. There will also be a street intervention on October 4 at the Revive Art Gallery.