Let no one be deceived. It is not that the Dansa Metropolitana festival opens today at the Mercat de les Flors with a folk dance show. Of course, they appear inserted in this Carcaça, which is how the latest by fashion choreographer Marco da Silva Ferreira (Santa Maria da Feira, 1986) is titled, which will be seen today and tomorrow at the MAC room (8 pm).
With his characteristic impetuous and happy dance, the Portuguese creator seeks to cross current social dances –house, street dance, clubbing, techno, hip-hop, contemporary African dances…– with the tradition that geographically and politically touches him. For example, the vira, a ternary dance from the Minho region that can be reminiscent of the jota, or the fandango that Scarlatti introduced to the Peninsula through Spain.
Now that it is 50 years since the death of António de Oliveira Salazar, a look at the past of the Portuguese creators can be healing. Da Silva tries to investigate the construction of a collective identity. And, why not, delve into memory, observe how the heritage inherited from other generations is incorporated into bodily expression. And, especially, how the Salazar dictatorship, as happened with Franco or other totalitarian regimes in Europe, capitalized on folklore to shape a national identity.
“There have been dictatorships that have marked us globally and it has been through them that this folklore has been formed. That is part of my work. I wanted that encounter between patriotic dances shaped through history: traditional dances that we integrate into our current heritage, that share certain steps, tempos, ways of placing the weight of the body…”, warns the choreographer. Trained in physiotherapy, which allows him an anatomical analysis of certain dances, he admits that he started dancing late. Although it did not take long for him to consolidate an author’s discourse: Hu(r)mano.
“There are moments in history when we tend to want to forget,” he continues. The period of the dictatorship was painful for my parents, they needed to skip it. Perhaps it is time to spur memories to understand the limits and question the current situation, because strong right-wing movements are emerging in Europe and to stop them it is necessary to look back. Hence the title: the casing is a structure that exists, it vibrates, but now it is not full of matter”.
His parents, he says, are curious that young people want to relive the past. “Some have a conservative view of what I do, but there are many people who want to talk about it and search archives for this material about themselves. They don’t want information to get lost in a space of negativity.”
For her part, the Brazilian Poliana Lima, who has been in Madrid for 13 years, presents from today to Saturday at the Mercat (7:30 p.m.) Things move but they don’t say anything. It is not a nihilistic approach, she says, on the contrary: “Everything is in motion but life does not have a discourse beyond life itself. And dance does not have to make meanings beyond its own development: the meaning of dance is in the dance itself”, indicates this graduate in Social Sciences and ballet.
His piece Hueco was a candidate for the 2018 Max Awards, and in that one at the Mercat he has nine women who abandon themselves to the banding of their spine. “I feel that the body and the dance are the fastest way to access philosophical and deep ideas. It is not just something cognitive: the questions that you can hear and experience in these pieces go through me”.