Overview: With flamenco's soleá style as a point of departure, we explore our relationship to grief, solitude, community, and healing through movement, poetry, and voice. The work is the result of therapeutic arts and devised theater processes.

Tickets: https://www.borderlightcle.org/2026-show/the-solea-project/

Cast:

Director/concept/facilitator: Alice Lawhorn

Creators: Carmen Alcorn, Marie Carr, Missy Grieco, Tianyi Guo, Sujata Lakhe, Alice Lawhorn, Rebecca Walker, Natalie Weaver

Performers: Carmen Alcorn, Marie Carr, Missy Grieco, Tianyi Guo, Rebecca Walker, Natalie Weaver

Deep dive: I’m very excited to invite you to a devised movement research project this July put together by a small group of women who have dived into flamenco’s soleá through a variety of movement and poetic exercises. 

Devised means that the ensemble worked to create something new entirely from scratch without a preconceived structure or script. Movement research refers to the idea of exploring what our bodies both know and can express. All of that is a fancy way to say rehearsals were a laboratory where we found questions or used a task and focused on the process, not forcing a specific outcome but letting the movement and poetry that unfolded be the central focus. 

I struggle again and again with describing to people The Soleá Project. It’s not one thing, and it depends on the setting and the participants. What has remained constant is a desire to share flamenco’s soleá style and its capacity to offer catharsis and to re-encounter one’s inherent dignity while coming face to face with our relationship with grief, death, loss, and trauma. 

It started with Abrepaso’s first performance, in which I performed soleá for the first time. While that’s its own feat, it was also one of my early choregraphies in the sense of discovering new movement and developing a process for a work - not just copying and pasting or slightly altering steps I’d learned from other people. 

I’ll never forget how I felt backstage after the first night’s performance - I had put myself in an emotional state in dancing soleá that could only have been reached in that moment, through that choreography, and through soleá  - not duende per say, but a release - catharsis in its sense of purification, ritualistic cleansing, purging, that led to a sense of restoration of self and dignity. It sounds very ethereal, cultish, hippyish, but it’s actually reaching to the heart of the human experience of arts and community. 

I wanted to share that possibility of renewal that soleá offers - but to people who are not flamenco artists. I began by teaching workshops at the Children’s Grief Center in Albuquerque, NM in 2017, and have gone on to teach workshops, lead residencies, and even choreograph at numerous institutions such as Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland Public Theatre’s Station Hope, Cleveland State University, Oberlin College & Conservatory, The Hispanic Senior Center, Jewish Family Services and funding from Spaces and the Presidential Scholars Seed Fund and as an InBreak residency fellow. 

Yet, what has been missing is the performance aspect - I think that’s where the ritualistic purification comes in - the act of being witnessed that allows for healing and transformation of both the performer and audience. So, with no other commissions this Spring, I decided this was the time to try out a devised performance work of The Soleá Project. 

Here we are - presenting the work at the BorderLight Festival in July! 

What a journey too - I can hardly believe we began in winter, in a cold studio, empty notebooks and a vague sense of embarking on something new. We meet nearly weekly for two and a half hours every Saturday. The first several weeks we worked on creating a base of raw material from a variety of structured tasks rooted in soleá. Then, we began to mold this material into a cohesive piece. 

The process has included warm-up games more similar to theater, translating visual arts and poetry into movement, writing poetry, and more. I feel very privileged to be the facilitator/director for the work - really, I get to witness everything as it unfolds.

The participants - Carmen Alcorn, Marie Carr, Missy Grieco, Tianyi Guo, Sujata Lakhe, Rebecca Walker, Natalie Weaver - have fearlessly approached every structured exercise and supported one another. 

It’s one thing to do the soleá project as a residency in the sense that I am offering tasks and participants can take what they see fit from that. But to have to create something concrete that can be shared demands quite a bit from the participants, mentally, physically, and in spirit. 

The unknowing at the beginning - from both participants and myself - allows for space for the unexpected to unfold. Connections that would otherwise not have been made, coincidences that become central to evoking a feeling in the work. 

I hope you’ll join us as an audience member as we present what we’ve spent the last several months putting together. The process will also serve as a model for future renditions, though the beauty of the project is that each rendition is different.