Para.Mar Dance Theatre in rehearsal for “Mujeres”/Photo: Andrew Weeks

Para.Mar Dance Theatre has long championed the creative power of Latina women, so it’s fitting that the company’s first ever evening-length work, created by founder and artistic director Stephanie Martinez, is inspired by a monumental figure: Chilean poet, journalist and diplomat Gabriela Mistral. Martinez talks with Newcity about the creation of the piece, which runs April 17 and 18 at the Logan Center for the Arts.

Why did you decide to make an evening-length work and what was top of mind for you going into the process?

Personally, what inspired me was that it felt like a necessary evolution. I’d been making twenty-five- and thirty-five-minute pieces but I’m feeling the need for more space to let pieces breathe a little more and create an actual world. Also to allow an audience to sit inside something in a more immersive and layered way.

The inspiration for this work is poet Gabriela Mistral?

That’s right, and her “Locas mujeres” poems. I’ve been working on her for years—as an artist, a poet, someone from a different time. She was [alive from] 1889-1957 but she still feels very relevant. She truly redefined women’s roles in a patriarchal society that was unconcerned about women’s suffering. These poems are about women in their extremes: what makes you go loco. I wanted to dive deep into each poem—the fervent woman, the abandoned woman, the happy woman—and what’s behind that. The faces women wear and the glimpses of who they are in society.

Mistral was a Nobel Prize winner and identified as the mother of her country. She was deeply concerned with the underprivileged and oppressed. In my mind, she’s every woman. There are many facets of ourselves. The evening-length structure is allowing me to explore an accumulation over time, which is necessary for this work.

How does Mistral’s relevance resonate for you today?

She holds a profound emotional contradiction—she’s a little tender, she’s brutally honest all at the same time. It feels physical for me and that’s a great vessel for dance. Her poetry demands movement; there’s a weight to her and a tension. That was my choreographic entry point with her.

Tell me about your collaborators on the project.

Georgia Dahill-Fachel is an incredible composer. I’ve never worked with a composer before, not on something as massive as this. From the beginning we were interested in creating a world that feels atmospheric but not directive. For me, her music holds a lot of space and breathes with the dancers. She has a lot of sensitivity to the texture of what I’m doing and it allows my choreography to feel more organic.

And then the visual artist Antonia Contro feels equally integral to the backdrop and approaching it as design and a storyteller partner, and not decoration. Her work helps build the world these women and men inhabit. There’s a shared language between all of us around symbolism and visual clarity. They expand the vocabulary.

Tell me about the visual design elements: is it projection, set design?

It’s all of it. There’s projection, sets, doors, windows, suitcases. There are a lot of things that exist in the real world, existing in this world, and fun to make literal or abstract. Having freedom and the rules I’m making feel important.

Can you give me an example of a rule?

If you see a chair, a desk and a door, we’re inside. It’s abstract, but we establish inside and outside. Mistral could be herself in her home, but on the outside, she had a lot of duty and needed to be somebody else. We establish domestic interiors that feel intimate. Or it feels like someone just came in your house and the scene has changed. There’s a lot of theatricality in this work—there’s a lot of dancing but a lot of scene work as well.

Do you have any hopes for the audience response to “Mujeres”?

I want to frame it as both dancers and audience—that they feel it’s rooted in urgency and history. And a metaphor for how we are in the world. I think every step carries memory and versions of a person, and we’re trying to unpack that.

Para.Mar Dance Theatre’s “Mujeres” at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 East 60th,  April 17 & 18 at 7pm. Friday tickets $10-$30; Saturday benefit tickets begin at $100. Tickets and info at paramardance.com.