Give it aYear

Asked in many different ways as to my relationship to performance and to the arts, my responses point to the rituals and rites of passages I participated in at home. My family was not in short supply of events to celebrate. There was my aunt’s wedding with the many yard-long tulle veil sprinkled with marigold appliques that my mother sewed, and the trip to the beach that my mother organized for all of her neighbors and that turned out to be more like a secular pilgrimage to Water. I learned about time not by checking a clock, but by watching my cousin’s braid grow longer and longer —for years— as a promise made by his mother to a saint in exchange for his health. 

In Give It a Year, we work as a team developing a rite of passage that helps you to plan, organize and experience deep transformation, leaving the familiar behind, engaging in struggle as you cross a symbolic or tangible threshold, and then returning to your point of departure —conceptually or literally speaking— with the wisdom that you might have gained along the road. Rites of passage pertain, for example, to change of occupations, inner or outer relocations, and aging.

Another element of Give It a Year is that of ceremony. This can be pursued in tandem with a rite of passage, perhaps at its completion, or undertaken separately to honor a loved one, to recognize a milestone in our lives, or to give thanks. How I guide you in the planning and enacting one or both of these offerings evolves out of conversations on your cultural backgrounds, and is meant to reflect your very specific social locations, stories and histories. I am personally committed to respecting the traditions of all cultures and will therefore work only with those of your own, so as not to incur any form of cultural, material, intellectual or spiritual appropriation. 

Give It a Year entails ongoing meetings and exchanges that can take a minimum of three months or longer to complete and to reflect upon. I trace my incursion into rites of passages and ceremonies to my grandmother Josefa Benedicta Ovalles Raful, to my mother Margarita María Raful Ovalles, and to my dear friends Bernardo Mejía and Josué Gómez.