2023-10-26 01:06:33
A couple of years ago, the choreographer Amaya Galeote (Madrid, 47 years old) worked as head of the stage movement in Alfredo Sanzol’s work ‘The bar that swallowed all the Spaniards’. Since the actors had to dance to songs from the 60s, it occurred to her to ask her parents what it was about the guateques and the grabbed. “I asked them if they didn’t mind if I came home to record them dancing in the living room,” she recalls. «They played a couple of songs and I got excited. I saw them with different eyes. “Suddenly, I realized that I knew very little about my parents when they weren’t parents.”
The result of that epiphany is ‘Those who danced’, a production by the National Dramatic Center created by Galeote, which will be performed this Friday at the Sala BBK in Bilbao (7:30 p.m. 12 euros). A mixture of a play, a documentary projected with testimonies from an entire generation and a festival, in which the public actively participates by going out to dance on a stage with folding chairs. Peace of mind, because anyone who doesn’t want to get up from his seat doesn’t have to do so.
–Do you know that my parents met in the 60s dancing at the Portugalete chicharrillo?
-Come now! They are not the only ones. I would still continue researching and interviewing people.
–But I have never seen them dance.
–Because we no longer go to festivals or village festivals, like when we were little. To the new generations of dating apps it must sound like science fiction that people met each other like this before. Many young people who come to the show and who, like me, knew nothing about that time, are surprised. And they are sad that we are no longer going to dance, there is a nostalgia for the unknown.
Trailer for ‘Those who danced’, from the National Dramatic Center.
In Spain in the 60s and 70s, dancing was one of the few spaces in which men and women could interact with some freedom. A place for the celebration of the body and sensuality, to interact in community, always the object of censorship and repression of moralisms and religion. ‘Those who danced’ claims this function with a playful and didactic sense; it is, at the same time, a history lesson, a stage experience and an enjoyable party.
Amaya Galeote knew that her 76-year-old father, Julio Galeote, had played in Los Ibors, a group that performed Beatles songs, but she did not know that he danced so well with her mother. “We were always very interested in my grandparents’ generation, those who lived through the Civil War, but not in our parents’,” she says. The dancer and choreographer began asking her friends to let them record her parents dancing. For a year and a half she carried out field work that bore fruit in the work, asking what songs they danced to, how they did it and under what circumstances.
A pasodoble, the mambo, the twist, the madison, the yenka, a rock and roll… Whether at a town festival or in a hotel in Imserso, if the adults go out to dance they are always surprised by how well they do it. do. They take it seriously. “They all dance super well, because it was their way of relating, they didn’t know each other any other way,” says the author of the work, who acts as master of ceremonies in it. «The grip thing is very strong. There is a code: who takes out who, if I put my elbow like that it’s because I don’t like you… Women waited for men to take them out, something that today seems Martian to us but that defined a society.
The record player could not be missing from ‘Those who danced’.
Graduated in Classical Dance from the Royal Conservatory of Madrid, Amaya Galeote was a dancer until she was 34 years old. And it is now, almost 50, that she has discovered the pleasure of dancing. «For me it has not meant freedom or pleasure, but sacrifice and discipline. Only through the eyes of these elders have I been able to see dance as something playful. They even told me that they were rehearsing at their house to dance better rock and roll or twist when it arrived. People from the towns came to Madrid to the halls to see dancing to learn.
Amaya Galeote acts as master of ceremonies.
Each performance of ‘Those who danced’ is unrepeatable because the audience is always different. Questions can alter the script. The record player starts up and, boom, the memories and memory of a country emerge.
–What happens when we dance?
–We make community. We communicate with movement and an unrepeatable intimacy is created with the person you dance with.
–Is there dancing in the clubs today?
–I think not, but I don’t know very well either.
#danced #dance #grabbed #parents