SAINT PETER- DUCK/GOOSE PULLING

Performance / Theatre / Site-specific responsive work

Saint Peter / Carrera de Patos is a theatre and performance work that unfolds as an ongoing, site-responsive research into ritual, festivity, and embodied memory. The project originates from Elyla’s upbringing in rural Nicaragua (Abya Yala), where communal games involving animals operate at the intersection of celebration, masculinity, devotion, and violence. Rather than treating these practices as fixed or culturally isolated, the work follows their ritual structures as they reappear across different territories - including Abya Yala, Spain, and Europe.

Each iteration of the performance adapts to the context in which it is invited, deepening through local research and public space engagement. The work is shaped by walking actions, costume, participation, and spoken fragments, activating the body as a living archive rather than staging reenactment or direct representation.

I left the house running and pushed my way between people.
I don’t remember much — only blood falling from the sky
and the happy faces of men celebrating.

These memories surface not as testimony alone, but as a way of tracing how ritual transforms violence into festivity, and how celebration absorbs acts that would otherwise remain unspeakable.

The performance engages questions of gender, belonging, and displacement, drawing from the vernacular violence embedded in language itself — where pato (duck) becomes an insult for queer bodies, and the animal figure slips between symbol, slur, and companion.

You are not a woman. You are not a man.
Could you perhaps be a duck?

Rather than offering resolution or catharsis, Saint Peter / Carrera de Patos holds grief, memory, and contradiction in suspension. The work asks how histories are carried in the body, how traditions travel and transform, and where a body marked by multiple territories can momentarily rest.

In what territory do I release this grief?
Where does this pain belong?
What horizon is possible for this body - this body-territory - of mine?

The project remains deliberately open: a performance that shifts with each place, inviting audiences into a shared space of attention where ritual, memory, and public presence are negotiated rather than resolved.