The Dance of the Hummingbird – Ndukun at WhiteBox NYC
On March 15, 2025, WhiteBox NYC hosted “The Open Seam: Torbellino 1—the Dance of the Hummingbird” by Ndukun, a powerful live performance by Colombian-Mexican artist Yohanna M. Roa. This performance formed a central part of Roa’s solo exhibition The Open Seam, which ran throughout March at the nonprofit’s Lower East Side space. Drawing on a profoundly personal and spiritual encounter with a Kogi man from Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Roa transformed the gallery into a ceremonial space where movement, textiles, and sound converged to express a radical reimagining of race, gender, and cultural identity.
The performance was inspired by the concept of a “fifth race”—the hummingbird—shared with Roa during her encounter with the Kogi man. Unlike the racial categories that typically define identity through fixed physical or geographic traits, the hummingbird represents a being that moves freely across borders, spreading messages of peace and balance. In Torbellino 1, Roa embodied this idea, offering a visual and choreographic metaphor for the hummingbird’s flight: fluid, transnational, and transformative.
At the heart of the performance was the torbellino, a traditional Andes Mountains dance whose swirling, trotting rhythms help dancers navigate mountainous terrain. Rooted in Indigenous Colombian traditions but infused with Spanish colonial influences, the torbellino exemplified the cultural hybridity that Roa explored throughout her performance. Rather than present a folkloric reenactment, Roa reimagined the torbellino as a ritual of resistance and resurgence. Each step she took across the gallery floor felt deliberate and ancestral, echoing histories of migration, memory, and embodiment.
Roa’s costume, central to her practice and this performance, functioned as both wearable sculpture and political statement. These so-called “historiographical textile sculptures” referenced garments like the reboso, pollera, huipil, and mantón de Manila. Each layer and fold of fabric was meticulously constructed to tell a story—not only of personal heritage, but of collective struggle, cross-cultural exchange, and colonial legacy. By wearing these hybrids of Indigenous and European textile traditions, Roa made visible the complex, often painful negotiations embedded in women’s bodies and clothing across Latin America’s history.
Her movements were measured, deliberate, and at times trance-like, blurring the line between performance and ritual. As she circled the gallery, accompanied by live and recorded sounds evoking the hum of wings and traditional string instruments like the tiple, the audience witnessed a transformation unfold—not just of the artist, but of the space itself. WhiteBox, typically a venue for contemporary art, was momentarily transfigured into a sacred site, resonant with histories that could not be easily cataloged or contained.
What distinguished Roa’s work was her refusal to simplify the intersections she traversed. Her performance did not just symbolize hybridity; it enacted it, through layered textiles, multilingual soundscapes, and a choreography that echoed both ceremonial procession and contemporary dance. She challenged not only racial binaries but also the rigid boundaries of nationhood, gender, and artistic discipline.
In that sense, the hummingbird was not just a metaphor but a methodology. Roa moved like a hummingbird—nimbly between worlds, defying linear narrative and taxonomic logic. The performance made space for contradiction: the tension between memory and invention, tradition and contemporaneity, reverence and resistance. Her use of garments as both armor and archive also emphasized the political potency of fashion and fiber art, especially in Latin American feminist practices.
The audience’s role was not passive. As viewers encircled Roa, many standing, some seated on the floor, the proximity invited a sense of communal witnessing. Eyes followed every gesture, every turn of her foot, every shift in fabric. Yet even in such closeness, there remained a certain distance—one that respected the ritual dimension of the work. It was as though we were watching not only an artist, but a medium, channeling the voices and visions of many generations.
Roa’s performance was the emotional and conceptual core of her solo exhibition, The Open Seam, which featured sculptural installations and textile works that echoed the themes of migration, memory, and cultural syncretism. While these objects remained on view in the gallery throughout the show’s run, the March 15 performance animated them with an ephemeral vitality that could not be replicated. It reminded viewers that identity is not static, not sewn shut, but constantly unraveling, always becoming—an open seam.
In the broader context of Latin American diasporic art, Roa’s work resonated with urgent relevance. At a time when migration, borders, and cultural identity dominate global discourse, Torbellino 1 offered a nuanced, poetic counter-narrative. It proposed not assimilation or purity, but multiplicity. It made a case for an identity politics grounded not in fixity, but in movement, relation, and transformation.
Roa’s commitment to both aesthetic rigor and political depth sets this performance apart. It was sensuous and cerebral, grounded in rigorous research yet emotionally resonant. The work demanded time and attention, but it rewarded that commitment with layered meaning and rare beauty. Few performances manage to merge the personal with the cosmic so seamlessly.
In retrospect, The Open Seam: Torbellino 1—the Dance of the Hummingbird – Ndukun was more than a performance—it was a proposition. It asked: What might it mean to live like the hummingbird? To belong not to a single place or people, but to a movement, a rhythm, a purpose? For those who witnessed it at WhiteBox, Roa’s answer was embodied in every stitch of cloth, every grounded step, every shimmering pause. It was an invitation to unlearn, to listen, and to dance.
