Walker Art Center and Northrop present
Lemi Ponifasio:
Love to Death (Amor a la muerte)
Friday – Sunday, March 31 – April 2, 2023
8:00 pm
McGuire Theater

Love to Death (Amor a la muerte)
Directed by LEMI PONIFASIO
Performed by ELISA AVENDAÑO CURAQUEO and
NATALIA GARCÍA-HUIDOBRO
Choreography by LEMI PONIFASIO and NATALIA GARCÍA-HUIDOBRO
Lighting by HELEN TODD
Music and sound by ELISA AVENDAÑO CURAQUEO and
LEMI PONIFASIO
Photography by LEMI PONIFASIO
Love to Death (Amor a la muerte) is a 2020 Barcelona Grec Festival and Teatro a Mil Foundation production.
The US tour of Love to Death (Amor a la muerte) is supported by the Teatro a Mil Foundation and La Dirección de Asuntos Culturales (DIRAC) del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile.
Presented in Mapudungun and Spanish without surtitles.
The performance runs approximately 70 minutes.
WELCOME FROM PHILIP BITHER AND KARI SCHLONER
Welcome to the Walker Art Center’s McGuire Theater for Lemi Ponifasio’s Love to Death (Amor a la muerte), copresented by Northrop, University of Minnesota, as part of the Walker’s 2022-23 Performing Arts season.
Both Northrop and Walker staffs have actively followed Samoan contemporary theatre/dance creator Lemi Ponifasio’s powerful and distinctive work for well over a decade, hoping someday that we could bring it to Minnesota. After three years of planning and complex logistical efforts, we are so pleased to be bringing Ponifasio’s most recent urgent, highly visual, visceral and resonant performance work to you.
Since the early 90s, Ponifasio has travelled the world, collaborating with people from all walks of life, creating increasingly larger, more ambitious site-based works, operas, theatre and dance productions and visual art exhibitions, often seen at the world’s most prominent festivals, theaters, and museums.
Premiering in 2020 in Santiago, Love to Death grew out of Ponifasio’s ten-year creative partnership with the indigenous Mapuche people of Chile, creating together a poetic performance work centered on questions of identity and destiny, seeking a more equitable future for the Mapuche people. A collaboration between creator/director Ponifasio, his long-time lighting designer Helen Todd and the two riveting performers – Mapuche singer Elisa Avendaño Curaqueo and Chilean contemporary flamenco dancer Natalia García-Huidobro – Love to Death weaves together deeply rooted performance rituals and strands of Chile’s history with larger themes of world-wide environmental justice and global indigenous rights.
Both Northrop and the Walker extend a special, heartfelt thanks to our members, subscribers, and donors. Through your attendance and contributions, you enable Northrop and the Walker to be able to continue to bring transformative world-class artists like Lemi Ponifasio to the Twin Cities community. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Philip Bither
McGuire Director and Senior Curator, Performing Arts, Walker Art Center
Kari Schloner
Executive Director, Northrop

About Love to Death (Amor a la muerte)
"The Mapuche asked me to tell their story to the world, and I will."
– Lemi Ponifasio, in an interview about Amor a la muerte in La Tercera.
An artist from the Pacific who has revolutionized how we understand theater and dance brings together on stage a Mapuche singer and composer and a flamenco bailaora [dancer] to talk to us about two worlds through their bodies and stories.
The Holland Festival, the Edinburgh and Avignon festivals, and venues such as the New York Lincoln Center and the Paris Théâtre de la Ville have all supported the talent of Lemi Ponifasio, a Samoan director, designer and choreographer who, often taking history and his own roots as his starting point, has approached the worlds of theater and contemporary dance in a radically innovative and unconventional way. Now he is directing his latest creation with the Chilean platform for critical reflection, MAU Mapuche, through which he touches on issues ranging from the Mapuche people to nature, female identity, and power.
The work’s central characters are two women who bring to the stage their talent and bodies, tools they use for speaking to us about the communities they come from and, at the same time, about the history and future of Chile. The work is performed by Natalia Garcı́a-Huidobro, a Chilean artist who has developed a very personal line of contemporary Flamenco creations in collaboration with artists from different disciplines, including outstanding visual and musical artists. She has been leading the La Tı́pica company since 2000 and the productions she has directed include El arrebato, Our prayer and A ras de tierra. Sharing the stage with her is Elisa Avendaño Curaqueo, a woman from the Mapuche community from Chile's La Araucanı́a region. She has spent her entire life immersed in her people’s culture, studying and practicing the Mapuche language, traditional Mapuche medicine, and composing and performing, as she does in this show, traditional music from her community. She uses the Mapuche language in her performances as well as traditional tools that speak to us of her people’s rich culture. Together the two artists offer a reflection on State power and the repression suffered by the Mapuche people which contains ritual elements highly characteristic of Lemi Ponifasio offerings. The performance was created between New Zealand, where the director works, and Chile, where it premiered. This is Ponifasio's third work that delves into Mapuche culture, after I am Mapuche (2015) and Ceremonia Performance MAU Mapuche (2016).
Statement by Mapuche leader, Lonko Juana Calfunao, in a meeting of the Original Nations and parliamentarians of the Chilean Congress (2011)
Mr. President, I want to ask you a question:
Why do you legislate so fast when it comes to your salaries, your benefits?
And why does it take so much time to legislate on issue 169?
How many years did it take to make that law valid here in Chile?
Good afternoon traditional authorities, good afternoon men and women that are here today.
I think that today we are worthy of congratulating ourselves, all, for the ability and fortitude we have had to survive 200 years of genocide, repression and judicialization, and that today we are here product of poverty, of extinction, of extermination, of all the killing that exists upon us in the 9th region, and we've been here brothers.
That's why I want to ask you, to each and every one of you: Will we continue under the wing of the Chilean State or will we ask for autonomy and self-determination and the restitution of our lands?
What are we going to ask for today?
AUTONOMY!
Do you want territory or not?
YES!
In 1852, on July the 2nd, this parliament, the deputies that existed at that time, the same as those of today, with the same Chilean legislation, they entered the Mapuche territory, violating our rights, killing our people, our grandparents, our mothers, our brothers, that existed at that time.
Today, year 2011, it is the same situation.
Are we women going to keep enduring that they keep hitting our children, let them keep killing us, let them keep violating us from the womb of our mothers, let them keep killing our children that we bring in the womb?
Are we going to continue bearing that, brothers?
Are you Chilean or are Mapuches?
Or are you indigenous?
Then we have to make our hand felt here in the congress and tell them that here is the Mapuche nation, the nation of Janequeo, the nation of Pelentaro, the nation of Lefratru, the nation of those men and women who gave their life for us to exist here.
We can't keep letting the deputies and senators keep designing laws that are destined to usurp our lands, to murder our people, our humanity, to exterminate our people by legislating their laws.
Today in a different way, in the name of technology, they keep us imprisoned, in the name of god, they keep killing us, in the name of all of that they keep taking the lands from us.
In the meantime, their pockets and the banks of the European Union and different banks in the world are overfilled with money and we have to bear poverty and extinction.
They are taking all our wealth.
That's why brothers, all together: let’s defend the territory!
And today, here we are, the lonkos; it’s with us they have to deal, the parliamentarians and deputies.
Here we stand, the nation of Pelentaro, here we stand, the women that defend our kids, here we are the mothers that are the future of our nations It’s with us that they have to deal with!
We can't keep letting them keep subordinating us.
We do not want any institution:
we don't want CONADI,
we don't want Origin Plan.
We, the women who have suffered, who have lived under dominion, under oppression, we must take control and economic monopoly for our future children, and to give a fair projection of life to our people, it’s necessary.
But we can't keep asking for a crumb, a space… Space must be made comrades and brothers! Our space has to be respected.
We have not come here to ask the deputies and senators to legislate for us.
We have come to demand that you no longer legislate for us, do not speak for us.
We are going to speak for ourselves.
Never again, brothers.
That's why we have to decide today what Brother Juan Valeria said: we are a nation, and as a nation we need a territory, extermination free, and autonomy.
Companies that enter the territory must consult with us, and if they don’t: OUT!
Out of our territory.
It is our life or theirs.
Chaltu may, pu lamgen. (Thank you very much, brothers.)

Learn More
“This is a work that’s a prayer, almost. It’s not a work for dinner and date. You are really asking someone for what’s in their heart.” … “it’s a report from this part of the world, you know? It’s not a political report or the weather report, but it’s a sense of these two women. They’re basically talking about their lives. Through the performance, you can see the world that they are dealing with—whether it’s the community, the oppression, politics, the Indigenous culture, the loss, the pain of violence. But like I said, it’s in this prayer form of performance.”
– Lemi Ponifasio
Lemi Ponifasio sat down for a conversation with Alexandra Ripp in January 2023, shortly after performances at Chile’s Santiago a Mil International Theater Festival. Published by the Walker Art Center in conjunction with Ponifasio’s Love to Death (Amor a la muerte), the interview offers insightful context for the performance. To read more, visit www.walkerart.org/ponifasio.
About the Artists
Internationally renowned for his work in theater and dance, Samoan director, designer, and choreographer LEMI PONIFASIO is acclaimed internationally for his radical approach to theater, activism, and collaboration with communities. A pioneer in developing theater and contemporary dance in the Pacific, he stands out for his radical approach to these disciplines, with productions that move between and transcend the conventional ideas of theater, dance, and activism.
While firmly established in the international avant-garde, Ponifasio grounds his work within communities and diverse Maori and Oceanic cultures, exploring complex forms of knowledge such as oratory, navigation, architecture, dance, performance, music, ceremony, philosophies, and genealogies as a driving force in emphasizing local-oriented arts, indigenous cultural recovery, language and knowledge, thought and narratives that have been silenced or excluded.
He established MAU in 1995, as the philosophical foundation and direction of his work, the name of his work, and the people and communities he works with. MAU is the Samoan word that means “the declaration to the truth of a matter as an effort to transform.” In 2013 Ponifasio created MAU Wahine to focus on the Maori woman’s worldview through art, including the relationship with whanau, community, nature, and the potency of female existence. In 2013 Ponifasio founded MAU Mapuche in Chile to share and create work with indigenous Mapuche artists and communities. In 2017, 20 years after he first began making projects with Kanaky artists, he founded Theatre Du Kanaky with young people of New Caledonia.
His works are created in many different contexts and in different forms as solo performances with and without audiences or as opera, theatre or dance productions, ceremonies, exhibitions, installations, conferences, lectures, festivals, workshops, research and community residencies and community forums. Major productions have been staged in factories, remote villages, opera houses, schools, marae, castles, galleries, and stadiums in more than 60 countries.
The work with MAU has also been presented at festivals and exhibitions, such as Biennale di Venezia, Lincoln Center New York, BAM New York, Ruhrtriennale, Edinburgh International Festival, Salzburger Festspiele, Festival de Marseille, the Festival d’Avignon, Theatre de la Ville Paris, Onassis Cultural Centre Athens, Holland Festival, Vienna Festival, Santiago a Mil Chile, and others across Europe and the world. Learn more on the MAU website.
Lemi Ponifasio is a matai (High Chief) of Samoa. He holds the title Sala.
ELISA AVENDANOELISA AVENDAÑO CURAQUEO is a Mapuche artist who hails from the Manuel Chavarría community in Lautaro in the Araucania region. She has dedicated her life to speaking and teaching Mapundungun and Mapuche medicine, as well as composing and playing traditional Mapuche music, collecting material that has become an important source for storytelling. Her work has won her invitations to fairs and events related to the Mapuche culture in America and Europe. Curaqueo is the 2022 recipient of the Premio Nacional de Música 2022, given by the Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio.
A renowned Chilean flamenco dancer, NATALIA GARCÍA-HUIDOBRO began her career in dance in Mexico in 1992, when she joined the Danza En Cruz company. Between 2007 and 2011, she was a guest performer with Arte Flamenco and with the Glimt Theater Contemporary Circus, both in Denmark. And in 2009, she performed with the French company EME Punto. In 2017, she was a soloist in the Flamenco Fascination show at the Place des Arts Theater in Montreal, Canada. Based in Madrid since 2003, she has pursued her distinctive brand of flamenco through creative projects and teaching in cities throughout Europe. As an assistant choreographer, she has worked on two productions by New Zealand choreographer Lemi Ponifasio for Teatro a Mil, I am Mapuche (2015) and Ceremonia Performance MAU Mapuche (2016).