2023-08-04 22:29:16
Elena Córdoba is unwavering, self-taught and has stage poetics (like the good ones) as precise as it is diffuse. Three characteristics that have made possible the birth of and we will look like trees, one of the most dazzling dance pieces of this season due to its poetic and aesthetic scope and its unrepeatable cast. The piece, which premiered at the National Theater of Catalonia, arrived at the end of the season in Madrid, Replica Teatro, rearmed and flourishing. In addition, Córdoba premieres a new work this August at the Portuguese festival citemor, Oh, Jacintoand is preparing her first foray as an actress in the next work by Pablo Messiez, The gestures, which will premiere this December at the National Dramatic Center. elDiario.es talks with her and publishes the text of and we will look like trees.
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Further
Since independence, carving out its own path year after year, Córdoba has been influencing dance since its first piece, back in 1991, the invisible cities. Her influence as her creator is inversely proportional to the relevance that institutions and festivals have given her. Something not unusual, on the other hand. Córdoba arises from the dance movement UVI – The Unexpected in the eighties, possibly the most relevant movement of contemporary dance in this country. Its members revolutionized dance, the poetry of the great Mónica Valenciano, the approach to the artistic piece of La Ribot, the audiovisual incursion into the languages of the body of Olga Mesa. There is nothing. La Ribot and Mesa had to emigrate, and Valenciano, like Córdoba, continues on the margins of the institutions.
But if there is something clear, it is that contemporary dance, and by extension the Spanish scene, is incomprehensible without pieces from Córdoba such as no leash (2000), Business ends at ten (2002), love and hurt (2010) o I’m a stubborn heart cell (2014). Now this 61-year-old choreographer has done it again. and we will look like trees It is the wisdom of the old dancer of the national vanguard. A piece in which movement, space, word, light and sound come together to rebel against what is most human. The fear of forgetting, the fear, ultimately, of disappearing.
Observe a brain in a measly Tupperware
and we will look like trees It begins with Córdoba on stage saying a text in the first person in which he tells how he was once able to contemplate a human brain in a Tupperware. Córdoba expresses his distrust of that formless and gelatinous mass that should house our memories and confesses that he has begun to forget, that memories without time and without a name are presented to him, even though they have temperature, smell and image. And in the face of so much forgetfulness, he blurts out: “We have decided, by mutual agreement, to become wood (…) because all those who have skin are going to forget, all of us who have brains remember to forget. Don’t touch me and so you don’t forget me.
Córdoba withdraws, María José Pire (Córdoba’s alter ego, present in almost all his works since they met in Paris in the eighties to seek a training that did not exist in Spain) remain on stage), Jesus Rubio Gamo (one of the most important dancers in Spanish dance, with a movement where body and mind seem to unite and where one intuits, as in butoh dance, Rubio himself outside of his body, watching himself dance) and Clara Pampyn (Scenic animal that steps on the stage like very few others, in that way where technique is forgotten and only presence remains). A graceful cast that already worked together in the previous piece, creatures of disorder (2021). Córdoba has always had impressive casts, unrepeatable dancers as it was Mount Penela o performers hard to forget like Patricia Lamas or Carlos Fernández.
On this occasion, the cast completes it meadow light, one of the most interesting sound and stage artists of the new generation that emerged from that movement in Malaga that is bearing so many fruits. Prado combines her singing and her violin along with pre-recorded industrial sounds to make an unclassifiable soundtrack. The piece is completed with the lights of Carlos Marquerie and the image and video creation of one of the finest technicians on the national scene, David Benito. The creation of a live image where the trail of movement left by the dancers is, at the same time, chasing them, is one of the most amazing digital creations of recent years.
from biology
and we will look like trees It comes after years of research on the human body, of carving a path where science, body and poetry come together. years that set up poetic anatomy, a cycle that consists of nine pieces between 2009 and 2014 and that was never closed, “constantly reappears as a methodology and thought,” says Córdoba in conversation with this newspaper. Then came two key pieces in the path of this choreographer, I’m a stubborn heart cell (2014), in which he began “to work on the decomposition of the body and matter, that’s where botany came in”; and The birth of the old ballerina (2018), in which Córdoba begins to work with microscopes, studying the decomposition of plants: “Finding similarities between my already old body and what I saw in the microscope”, explains this dancer who confesses that she continues to dance every day but “In a completely different way, you have to gradually abandon the idea of force, of impulse.” “There is something from my own body that is moving away. This debate of how long and this lack are something that has permeated everything since then, ”she explains.
In and we will look like trees the encounter between human and botanical anatomy is complete, “the encounter responds, above all, to the desire I had to start working on the nervous system. When asked about this work methodology, Córdoba explains that the relationship between physiological or botanical studies and dance is strictly one of movement: ”The studio is a door, a door to matter to be able to work poetically. Although I can tell you that in a certain work I have worked on deposits of fat or on a scar, or on the shoulders, what you are going to see is something else. As Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker said, we work with something that, even if it is abstract, even if we look at it in a thousand ways, always returns something deeply human”, she concludes.
and we will look like trees It has a spiral structure, a spiral that will go from quiet and intimate movement to a body that unfolds in dance. A spiral that also contrasts and fights in clear opposition to the text. While the text influences the decision not to move, to become a tree, to stay still in order to buy time, the scene runs in the opposite direction. Movement thus becomes a suicidal decision, an act of pure vitality even if it entails death. While the text screams “Stay lying down, but stay. Stay still, but stay. Stay rigid, but stay. Stay dry, but stay. Stay down, but stay”, the bodies turn and move producing a tension that turns the scene into a macabre seguiriya, into a quejío where life and death fight.
And it is in that dance on the edge of the precipice where Córdoba, the choreographer who repudiated the choreographic composition, makes the dancers compose an original choreography. When asked about that composition so absent in her other works, Córdoba confirms that “it is true that there is a search to deepen the choreographic language, there is a certain writing done through the body, I am aware”. But it is not easy for him to explain why, “since it crystallized, when I was young, my thought about the body has always been dominated by a dance that cares much more about what happens to the body than the forms it produces. For many years I have worked like this. There are choreographers who work through what you see of the body. I have always worked with a subtext more inside the body. But now I’m thinking of developing an abstract language from the body in motion. This piece is a first step,” she concludes.
The creation of an artist is full of twists and turns, comings and goings that have little to do with linearity. Cordoba is a good example of this. Perhaps it is more appropriate to speak of obsessions, of tools that are taking shape to be more accurate at times, to mutate at others. and we will look like trees It is the result of that alchemy. From a human group that has been working together for more than five years, from the balance between the spoken word and the body sought for so many years, from the obsessive way with which Córdoba deals with opposites such as emptiness and transcendence, vitality and death, and in this way personal approach to worlds that are dissimilar in principle, such as scientific and artistic thought.
Water hyacinths and Pablo Messiez
Now Córdoba is working on a new piece together with David Benito and Luz Prado. piece that will premiere at the Citemor Festival, an event that takes place in a small Portuguese town in Baixo Mondego and that is committed to contact and understanding of the artist and avoids the premiere and mere exhibition. At the beginning of the month, the festival opened with Angélica Liddell, who presented the time has comethe first scenic approximation of the piece that this creator will take to the Temporada Alta festival, VUDÚ (3318) Blixen.
Cordoba will present Oh. Jacinto, a work on the water hyacinth, an invasive species that has colonized the Mondego River, transforming it into a vegetal landscape. “It is incredible, in that river that I visited so much with my children, you can no longer see the water course. I felt enormous vertigo looking for the river and not finding it, you can’t even see it, you only see that vegetal landscape of that beautiful plant that at the same time is extremely powerful”, he explains about this project that he will create together with David Benito and Luz Prado.
But at the same time Córdoba has embarked on a new adventure. For years she has worked as a body consultant and assistant director for different artists such as Silvia Pérez Cruz or Pablo Messiez. The latter has proposed to be in her new play, The gestures, as an actress, not as a dancer: “It scares me a lot, it scares me every day I go to a rehearsal. Pablo is a wonderful director of actors and I am still a person who comes from the movement. There is something that is very different for me, ”he confesses about this director known for having great actors in his casts capable of working on the text with astonishing ease and depth.
In this piece, Messiez has actors like Fernanda Orazi, Emilio Tomé, Manuel Egozkue or Nacho Sánchez. “I think about it and I start to sweat,” Córdoba exclaims, “but I trust Pablo, with very few people he would be able to take this step. In addition, Pablo is capable of generating very beautiful and powerful things in the human group with which he works. It’s amazing. I am terrified but it is one of the most beautiful challenges that have happened to me ”, she concludes.
#wise #force #dancer