NATTA
Natta Quintero is a visionary artist, dancer, and choreographer who transmits simplicity, harmony, and a sense of community through her various artistic expressions. Her multiform arts practice explores themes of the human experience and psyche, temptation, death, futurism, healing, and love. Hailing from Morelos, Mexico and currently based in the Bay Area, Natta has been globally trained in classical ballet, African dance, aerial, and modern dance, and was an understudy with the founders of Cirque du Soleil. She was the recipient of the Individual Artist Grant from the City of Berkeley Arts Council in 2022, and is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Academy Studio Azul - Movement and Design, as well as the school and dance company The Tea Dancers - Ballet de la Compasión.
Her dance training includes intensives with the “Street Theater and Circus Production” in Mexico with the Ecole de Cirque de Quebec; “Aerial Dance & Precarious Balance” with Humanicorp Dance Company; at the National Institute of Arts (CNA); with the Circus School of Barcelona; and "Rope and Harness" with Bandaloop in Oakland, California. She has been invited to dance in Washington D.C. at the Inter-American Development Bank and at the Organization of American Estates as part of the conferences of Vanguardia Latina: Latin-hemispheric agenda.
Her multimedia artwork has been exhibited in various museums, galleries, and arts venues including The Museum of the City of Cuernavaca, “Jardines del Sol” in Ocotitlan, Ex-Convento de Tepoztlán, and Auditorio Ilhucalli in Morelos, Mexico; in Chiapas at the Auditorio de Tuxtla Gutierrez; and across the Bay Area including The Mission Cultural Center, De Young Museum, Alcatraz Island, and The Mills College Theater.
WHO?
Q u é ? et Pourquoi?
I’m almost sure that I came from the future, where we will develop the power of bodily flight through the air; no need is there of motor cars or airplanes or any other form of mechanical transportation. No need of an industrialized society and mass-production factories.
I came into this world dancing: jumping out from my mother’s belly with a brave double turn. We didn’t know if I was a flower, a bee, or a hill. So I decided to become a fish. Exploring my surroundings, swimming throughout my childhood, between corn fields, mango trees, sugar cane, rain forests, volcanos, sulfuric ponds.
Until we realized that I was a small, tiny girl.
Absurdly time I spent; observing in the mirror, my human’s body. Where veins, arteries, palpitations, electrical shocks, flesh, bones, and the most important discovery: “the ear”, my best friend and which keeps burning in auditory impressions, as visual consciousness, forms, shapes, and delicious colors.
My twisted legs started to walk into the structures, schools, and academies…
Through many disconcerting misgivings, rules, laws, limits, and complex world’s methods of ignorance and darkness; where iron foundries, accumulations of the extreme; where red lights, where chaos and the 801 ways to nowhere impedes the manifestation of the Beautiful and destroys the spirit of life.
Quickly I started to study the science of Miracles, the Art of Healing Sounds and Movements. Challenging the trickiness of physics and psychics.
I fall in love, of the hologram regard. Taking asylum in every mountain, and in great Masters who pacify disasters (*so difficult to encounter in hundreds of millions of eons). With powerful sisters’ and brothers’ advices and in the name of human aging, death, sorrows, pains, lamentations and stupidity… I built a sword of pure compassion whose sound brings fires, inspiration, loving kindness and healthy colors into the mundane’s trance. Dancing pleasant or painful with a message from the future until my self’s disintegration.
Who?
I’m just a simple little lady who likes to drink tea.
Q u é ?
En México: He crecido a través del sistema de creencias donde no hay impedimentos, y desde infante creo firmemente en las fuerzas místicas así como en los poderes deslumbrantes que una mente libre puede desarrollar. En las hogueras de mi corazón hierven enormes sentimientos de frutas deliciosas como el zapote negro, la guanábana, el tamarindo, la pomarrosa, el mango petacón; triturados con testimonios, xilografías, petroglifos y cosas raras de ciertas pirámides, así como olores a manantiales muy picosos, grutas, cenotes, ríos y erupciones volcánicas.
Mientras las cenizas de la caña de azúcar caen sobre mi cabeza, los pensamientos de bugambilias, golondrinas, gladiolas, colibris, mariposas, pitas de maguey, venados, canarios, colorines, chapulines, tlacuaches, pinoles, moles, gallinas, guajolotes, itacates, ocotes y aguacates; se imprimen en poemas transformando la luz natural en colores, bordados y cantos de mujeres indígenas.
Guardo en el ombligo un códice rupestre de alquimias, así como cuentos de forasteros, leyendas, conjuros, mitos y sepa Dios que mas materia prima reciclada para hacer, armar, coser, pintar, bailar, y fabricar, verdaderas revoluciones de profundas inspiraciones sabor cocoa, cacahuate y chocolate; con húmedos mensajes de bosques, ceibas, y amates. Una verdadera jungla de lagartijas y guacamayas pues.
He vivido una intensa cruzada en busca de la constante aparición de cuerpos luminosos en los cerros, en la mar y hasta en mis sueños de coco en Punta Cometa. Soy pues un molino de pececitos arco iris del caribe. Una gota de rocío en el Maíz. Un tamal de anís, un helado de jícama con limón y chile. Una Luna en bicicleta que gira gracias a la fuerza de no sé que hechizo Azteca.
Pourquoi?
J’ai eu de tres fortes batailles contre les terrifiantes creatures imaginaires qui habitent aux plus profond de moi.
Je suis heureuse de constater que la liberte arrive comme une recompense à la recherche de l’innocence et de la simplicite. Et, a un tres fort desir de “sauter le plus haut possible”; d’oublier cette “attraction terrestre” et a toutes sortes de tentations qu’apportent la souffrance. Mon attirance a l’amour “et a toute la beaute qui impregne l’univers dans ses moindres manifestations” a fait de moi une fille avec une urgence de m’echapper de toutes sociétés humaines. Alors je suis, une petite exploratrice qui cherche les meilleures instructions pour en finir, la mort, la guerre, la misere, la disgrace. Et doucement apres laisser mon message, je vais disparaitre et retourner aussitot a manger des fruits exotiques dans le paradis que j’appartiens comme le bambin bambou que je suis.