The next three shows at the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona are dance proposals that have the hybridization of disciplines as a common denominator. These are Cavalo do Cão, by João Lima (on the 16th and 17th of this month), Las Ultracosas (on the 18th and 19th) and Mágica y Elástica (25th and 26th), by Cuqui Jerez, and Desbordes, by Amaranta Velarde ( from 23 to 25).
A performer born in Brazil and based in Barcelona, ??João Lima presents this Cavalo do Cão (dog’s horse), which in Brazilian Portuguese is an expression that refers to different things: an insect, whose bite causes terrible pain; to an indomitable person, and even to the horse that the devil rides. In Cavalo do Cão, João Lima starts from the concept of animality in transformation.
“It arises from the conviction that the past, like the future, is incomplete and under construction” affirms the choreographer. Lima reflects on modernity in a historical key and assures that it is “a story elaborated to celebrate the achievements of Western civilization, and that in turn hides its darkest side: colonialism.”
“Sometimes it is very difficult to put into words the postcolonial conception. And with Cavalo do Cão I look for another way to go through the story: through hyperbole” explains the Brazilian artist.
In this solo, Lima brings into play various relationships between voice and movement, oral and choreographic language. Through objects, space is treated as a place of post-colonialist tropical memory in Brazil, where these objects, he says, “have memory and are capable of revealing to us, not only history, but also another reality.”
The second show that arrives at the Mercat, Las Ultracosas, by the artist, choreographer and performer from Madrid Cuqui Jerez, summons five people on stage and transits between the choreographic, the objectual, the scenographic, the pictorial, the musical, the plastic and the theoretical. And it lasts five hours!
Las Ultracosas explores the limits of language from an aesthetic experience of contemplation. Thus, Jerez bases his show on the “image in a gerund”, in constant movement. He does it through tableaux vivo, where beings are alive but at the same time suspended in space and time.
Its duration is effectively five hours without intermissions, but the public can come and go during the performance. However, the constant transit through space follows “a dramaturgical line that is addictive, strategically determined, which makes very few people leave,” says Jerez.
A week later, the prequel to Las Ultracosas arrives at the Mercat. Cuqui Jerez presents Mágica y Elastica, a project with the collaboration of the author and performer Óscar Bueno. It is a deconstructed musical that explores the way in which sound, movement and image complement each other. These elements, affirm Jerez and Bueno “allow us to glimpse what language cannot yet capture”.
The last work on this Mercat de les Flors itinerary is Desbordes, by Amaranta Velarde. The show, with two dancers on stage and a live musician, investigates the concepts of overflow and containment in relation to aesthetics, corporeality and choreographic language.
Here the dancer and choreographer Velarde looks towards the camp aesthetic and the movement of the Neo-Romantic eighties. The characters look for emotion, overwhelming feelings, “although the means they use to reach them are bizarre”, alleges the artist.
The project investigates the human need to escape and produce alternate identities as a way of escaping from everyday limits. “We live in a regime of tyranny of emotion. Emotion is a form of escapism. We cover up our political impotence and the inability to capture a rational response to reality through emotion,” explains the choreographer.
At the level of choreographic language, the piece is based on physical containment, generating sculptures from which we want to take emotion to the extreme, a paradox between the external mask and generating an internal overflow.