Video documentation of Puerto Rican experimental dance performance mAroma, choreographed by Viveca Vázquez. mAroma is a stage adaptation based on Virgil’s The Aeneid, Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, and Tollinchis’ Rome’s Metamorphosis.

The Aeneid is the poem for Augustus’ Imperial Rome’s foundation. Circa 29 BC, Virgil was the best poet in the city and Augustus was victorious after a long war period. Augustus entrusted Virgil to write the poem of his glory. Three books are central in the this epic poem, IV and V, where the narration presents the love between Dido, Queen of Carthage and Aeneas; and book VI, where Aeneas goes to the Avernus to meet his father Anquises’ shadow. mAroma adapts these books and adds a new viewpoint by using Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma.

As Mara Negrón points out in the playbill for the staging of this piece in March and April 2006, mAroma navigates through the fragments of these stories without intending a lineal narration of the episodes. The characters circulate in a city without and identity -- it can be any city, any street in the world. Rome is not Rome, but a place of transit, riddled with encounters and misunderstandings, where the characters visit their own desires’ shadows, where the characters turn somersaults (‘hacen maromas’) in-between their past and their present. And at the same time, Rome is always Rome -- a place inhabited by its past. The characters of mAroma are yesterday and are today.’ In giving bodies to these characters, the performers insert themselves in the continuous dialogue between history and present, and the embodiment of that relationship on stage.