SALOME NIETO GREW up one of seven children in a conservative Catholic family in Mexico City. She remembers the expectations that were placed on her by society. As she puts it in a Zoom interview with Stir, there were certain ideals women like her were to live up to: the good girl, the loyal wife, the devoted mother. Deconstructing archetypes has always been a focus of the Vancouver-based dance artist’s work, as it was in her thesis for her 2023 master’s of fine arts in interdisciplinary arts out of SFU’s School for Contemporary Arts, called The 13th Chronicle.
“It’s kind of a rebellious thing—my response to the many codes that have been imposed on myself as a woman,” Nieto says of her research and full-length dance piece of the same name. “I was addressing the problem of femicide in Mexico, breaking down the archetypes and thinking of the many layers that live in our bodies as women passed on by our lineage. There is so much learned behaviour that shapes how we should act, and it goes back millennia. Being Mexican I am carrying 500 years, at least, of stories of oppression and expected behaviours by colonization. I was looking at how Catholicism was informing my identity and the woman I was supposed to be, the proper behaviour I was supposed to display. I realized that I needed to shake them out of me.
“As a performer and an artist who is a communicator and who has the ability to affect social consciousness and individual consciousness, I also have a duty to use my place as a performer to reimagine those ideas and to provide healing,” adds Nieto, who moved to Vancouver in 1992 at age 26, and who has performed across Canada and in Argentina, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Thailand. “We need to talk more about the healing. I am interested in performance as a tool to take a political stance. Art to me is political.”
Nieto will perform you say I’m a snake?, a solo excerpt of The 13th Chronicle, at the free opening event of the 2024 Vines Art Festival in a production called Keep Giving; Cedars and Shells. In partnership with Neworld Theatre, the show is being emceed by Manuel Axel Strain, a two-spirit artist of xʷməθkʷəyəm (Musqueam), Simpcw, and Syilx descent. Also appearing are May Point-Shaw, a xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam)/Irish independent artist whose alt-pop musical project is called stelliumPoint; Indian-born kirtan singer Gurnimit Singh; T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss; Miranda Dick; Segwses Strain; and Kalli van Stone, among other artists. There will be art installations by such local creatives as Chantelle Trainor-Matties, Sami Shahin, and Victoria Marie. Centred on nurturing of artists who are working toward land, water, and relational justice, Vines Art Festival is celebrating its 10th year. All events are free.
For Nieto, whose contemporary dance draws on everything from butoh to Mexican cultural influences, performing at Vines at St’ít’eweḵw’ (Second Beach) in Stanley Park is an honour and a joy.
“I enjoy site-specific performance because I can reach an audience that maybe otherwise I wouldn’t,” she explains. “Being in a park: I feel that is magical because we’re changing the landscape; it’s an opportunity to see ourselves in relationship to this place in a different way. I enjoy activating spaces to create a moment of magic.”
Nieto named her solo you say I’m a snake? as a nod to the symbolism of serpents. Snakes represent healing, rebirth, and fertility as well as temptation and evil. In the Christian faith, Satan, in the guise of a snake, prompted the fall by tricking Eve into breaking God’s command.
