from Oz's Brave New Works
Held Beneath the Tide: Lenin Fernandez’s Ritual of Grief and Matriarchy
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A giant plastic veil stretched across the stage like a membrane between worlds. Flashlights pierced through translucent shadows while a young woman lay motionless on the floor. Then, slowly, an elder performer with hair cascading nearly to her feet emerged from the darkness. Before a narrative could fully form, choreographer Lenin Fernandez’s Tears Made the Ocean had already submerged the audience into something emotional, subconscious, and deeply human.
Presented as part of the fifth annual OZ Arts Nashville Brave New Works Lab, Fernandez’s large-scale dance work transformed the theater into an ocean of grief, feminine endurance, memory, and collective healing. Utilizing the operatic intensity of Osvaldo Golijov’s Oceana, the performance unfolded less like traditional choreography and more like a shamanic rebirth of the rip tides within humanity itself.
Eight women moved across the stage like waves in constant transformation. Crawling, dragging, lifting, pulling, and embracing one another, the performers embodied the emotional labor of survival. At times, they appeared to rescue one another from invisible depths, becoming life rafts for each other individually and collectively. The choreography felt deeply collaborative, rooted in tenderness and synchronicity rather than domination. Even amid turmoil, the women held onto one another tightly, refusing to let go.
The semi-transparent veil shifted throughout the performance, becoming ocean, sky, subconscious, and suffocating force all at once. When the plastic descended over the dancers’ bodies, the imagery became chilling. The performers appeared engulfed beneath the weight of grief itself. Elsewhere, they gathered around what seemed to be a casualty, collectively mourning and carrying the body across the stage as though burying Mother Earth herself.
Yet Tears Made the Ocean never remained trapped in despair. Throughout the work, moments of profound tenderness emerged through hair, touch, and care. Toward the closing of the performance, younger women gathered around the elder performer in a breathtaking braid ritual, gently weaving and holding her impossibly long hair while embracing one another in silence. The theater filled with quiet tears and audible sniffles. What unfolded no longer felt like performance, but ceremony.
Hair and gentle touch became symbolic languages throughout the work. The elder performer herself felt representative of Matriarchy incarnate—Mother Earth as both nurture and fury, tenderness and strength. Bare feet and empty hands reinforced the vulnerability of the performers while simultaneously revealing their resilience. At one point, a woman rode across the stage on the back of another, evoking the phrase “on the shoulders of giants.” The image felt deeply connected to feminine lineage, inherited survival, and the invisible emotional scaffolding women have provided for generations.
“I think I have always been inspired by how women move through this world and everything that they have had to endure from the beginning of time till now,” Fernandez shared in conversation surrounding the work. “And I think that this work just wants to hold reverence for matriarchy and for community.”
That reverence permeated every inch of the performance.
Watching the work, I found myself reflecting on the matriarchs who shaped my own life. Raised initially by my grandmother in Colombia, I learned tenderness, warmth, and unconditional care through her presence. After immigrating to the United States at ten years old, my mother taught me resilience, sacrifice, and the fierce strength required to survive displacement and hardship. Tears Made the Ocean reminded me of the women who sculpt us long before we fully understand their sacrifices. It reminded me of the women who continue to endure, nurture, protect, and carry entire emotional worlds within themselves.
What makes Tears Made the Ocean particularly urgent within Tennessee’s cultural landscape is its insistence on compassion during a time when vulnerable communities continue to face political and social attacks. In a society increasingly defined by political division, misogynistic cruelty, immigrant detention centers, family separations, attacks on women’s rights, capitalist extraction, and emotional disconnection, Fernandez’s work asks audiences to return to feeling. To hold one another through the storm rather than surrender to isolation.
The brilliance of the work lies in its abstraction. Fernandez does not force a singular interpretation onto the audience. Instead, the choreography functions like memory itself: fragmented, haunting, nonlinear, and emotionally immersive. The ocean becomes a metaphor for the subconscious, feminine energy, collective trauma, and the uncontrollable force of being alive.
Through abstraction, ritual, and raw emotional vulnerability, Tears Made the Ocean transforms grief from an individual burden into a communal act of survival. Through movement and ceremony, Fernandez reminds us that healing may begin when we allow ourselves to be carried—however briefly—by each other.
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Andrés Bustamante is a Sculptor and Public Artist born in Cali, Colombia, working in South Florida. Bustamante studied at Watkins College of Art in Nashville, TN followed by an experimental practice in sculpture. Selected solo exhibitions include “Reflexion” at Watkins College of Art in Nashville, TN in 2022. He has been awarded the Artist-To-Artist award at ArtPrize 2024 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As well as having works in the permanent collection of MOCAN (Museum of Contemporary Art Nashville).His immigrant experience at a young age led him to existential questions about reality, and the abstract mystery of life. Embracing the abstraction in the human experience and ephemeral emotion. An attempt to say in shape, color, and material that for which the spoken language has no words for. Bustamante lives by the conviction that creativity is healing for humanity. He is passionate about community empowerment, mental health, and accessibility in the visual arts. To learn more about his mission and collect art visit andresbustm.com@andresbustm
