In this bilingual essay, David R. White, the director and executive producer of the Dance Theater Workshop, traces Pepón Osorio’s syncretism of aesthetic genres through his collaborative practices with either performance artists or dancers. In 1978, White describes how Osorio met fellow Puerto Rican choreographer Merián Soto who would become his main collaborator throughout the years. Later on in the early-1980s, independent dance artist, Patti Bradshaw, joined them to form the collective Pepatian. These collaborative projects would illuminate the artists’ goals of building a framework that captured their culture while simultaneously setting it free. As far as Osorio’s aesthetic is concerned, White considers his impulse to “scavenge and salvage” as the motto for the Puerto Rican artist’s style of guerilla archeology to whom “no object, ornament or slice of life would be irrelevant in their excavation of the everyday.” The author establishes a pertinent parallel between the aims of this artistic methodology, and the Puerto Rican concept of rescatadores de terreno [rescuers of land], which was a space appropriation and community building strategy that was implemented in the 1960s by an ad hoc cross-section of political activists, artists, and ordinary people without a stake in the official structures of real estate. This idea of rescue, in order to make space for the most basic level of daily life, denotes the larger significance of Osorio’s collaborative works. To wit: to assert the primacy of the most intimate structure of culture, and create parameters for both a living and analytical continuum between New York City and Puerto Rico.
