Maria Teresa Houar

Maria Teresa Houar

You have found a home

Driftpile Cree poet Billy Ray Belcourt once said, “It is in the realm of sexual life where the world is made and unmade, where it is won or lost.” Having heard these words for the first time in 2019, they resonated so deeply with me. They echoed in my mind throughout the choreographic process for my show Leviathan. In that production, I felt I had finally accomplished something that touched all the corners of my life. The show’s aesthetics were glamorous, Indigenous, dark, and critical. Most importantly, the show was erotic.

As a scholar, choreographer, and performer, my work has always been concerned with the erotic. I say this- fully aware of the associations this word carries- because my work aims to carve out a shared, cultural space that might let us understand the erotic as a powerful force for collectively reimagining a world without harm.

The erotic is more than just our sexual pleasure; it is the source of our joy and our passion. The erotic fuels creativity and gives purpose to our desires, but it also troubles the human vulnerability which we all share. Perhaps this is why our erotic lives are often hidden; sharing in our most vulnerable moments demands risk and a multitude of trust. Yet, it also requires mutual respect, care, and the knowledge of how to be within moments of intimacy. These are skills that can be taught, and these skills would mitigate risk and foster trust- if only they were a part of our shared cultural practice.

Our most private, intimate relationships are often our greatest (and only) opportunity to learn deeply undervalued skills that serve our public lives. Yet, intimacy is widely considered to be a strictly “private” matter. I believe this is one of the most insidious lies we have been coerced to accept at the level of community. Think about the reasons why we must fear being seen as powerful, erotic, and pleasure-loving humans in the first place- who (and what) does it protect to keep our intimate lives hidden and often tangled under layers of shame? How does this shame operate in ways that work to enforce and ensure our silence?

If care is the opposite of harm, then my work aims to question our tolerance of harm in juxtaposition with our intolerance of what is considered erotic. I ask, why do we deem scenes of consensual intimacy offensive while we willfully accept and even participate in the deeply offensive, ongoing, non-consensual violence that is endured by people, earth, and all living things in the name of economy and security? By averting our eyes from the erotic, we have neglected the knowledge of care learned only within moments of intimacy.

I have heard many choreographers wax poetic that movement is healing, or dance will change the world or some other version of this sentiment. I will confess that I don’t believe in dance any more than anything else. None of it means anything as long as we accept harm as a necessary consequence of our everyday lives.

My work, and the work of Leviathan Dance, aspires to imagine a world without harm.

Sometimes, I find this world in dance, In dance, I find so many moments of intimacy. In each moment I also find opportunity for the knowledge of how to care. I believe this is why dance chose me- these moments carve out a space for unapologetic joy, and for our shared, erotic lives.

 (CURRICULUM VITAE) 

ARtist Bio

Maria Teresa Houar is a queer scholar of Mexican, Portuguese and Haole descent, born and raised in Hawaiʻi on the outer islands of Kauaʻi and Maui. Maria Teresa is the artistic director of Leviathan Dance, and a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researching dance performance through intersectional lenses of sexuality, disability, intimacy, and consent culture.

Maria Teresa is the former head of the Contemporary Division at The Danceworx Performing Arts Academy Mumbai, under the direction of Bollywood choreographer Ashley Lobo (celebrity judge of "Dance, India, Dance!") and while in Mumbai she founded a service and scholarship dance program for the Reality Gives Organization, an NGO that promotes education and empowerment to the people of Dharavi. She is also the choreographer of the short film “Country of Bodies: Bombay in Dance.” Maria Teresa holds an MFA in Dance from Mills College in Oakland, BA Cum Laude in Art History for CSU Chico, and is also the recipient of the American Dance Guild Award for Choreographer-Educators from Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. She also organizes “Toast and Jam Festival” in Honolulu, an annual contact dance skills and food-sharing festival where people can build their partnering skills and foster collaborative practice across diverse dance and movement practices.

Dissertation Research:

Exotic Bodies, Occupied Territories: Performing Settler Security and BIPOC Precarity in Queer Nightlife and Erotic Entertainment at the Edge of Empire

Exotic Bodies, Occupied Territories is performance-as-research that examines exotic dance, burlesque, and other forms of erotic entertainment as a representation of “settler-erotics,” and these industries' often proximal relationship to military, histories of nuclear testing, and sites of Indigenous land dispossession. Erotic entertainment is a deeply complicated form of sexual labor within heteropatriarchal and capitalist settler societies. Through my experience as a queer dancer and nightlife entertainer, I consider how the aesthetics of erotic performance work to eroticize settler-sexuality (TallBear) and queer homonationalism (Puar). In Honolulu, Hawai`i, intersecting communities of Queer and Indigenous performing artists disrupt these definitions of erotic performance and create space for reading the resistive work of entertainers within these professions. I expand the term "settler-sexuality" to define “settler-erotics” and its aesthetics through the lens of erotic entertainment industries and their relationship to sites of Indigenous land dispossession and nuclear bomb testing done by the U.S. military near these sites. I argue that erotic entertainment as a leisure industry circulates gendered and racialized representations of bodies that eroticize concepts of labor and property integral to settler societies while also invisibilizing settlers' proximity to threats from the real impacts of war, as well as everyday military activity, such as the environmental and individual harm caused by the Red Hill Water Crisis. I bring recognition to the artists who subversively perform gender and sexuality in the Honolulu nightlife and Queer entertainment industries, and the ways their work disrupts the symbolic power of "settler-erotics" and enacts the potential of performance as resistance