There is no way to live in the countryside to sharpen perception and awareness. And the Barcelonan Aimar Pérez Galí, who has been watching the sun rise from home for some time – “something that is unthinkable in the city” – has made his latest research on dance a journey to the awakening of a language, to babbling a child who begins to articulate language and order elements. That is, he has immersed himself in choreographic composition. “Because, if dance is a language, it will have to have its own syntax and grammar. And although it does not have a Royal Academy of Language that tells it how to compose, there are certain parameters that you pay attention to,” he warns. the dancer, choreographer and pedagogue.
The result of these reflections is titled Alba and will be seen this week (from the 8th to the 11th) at the Mercat de les Flors, co-producer of the piece. It is, in the artist’s words, a collection of poems. A series of choreographed poems, short pieces that follow a methodology or way of approaching composition. Because this is the crux of Alba, choreographic composition. What’s more, he has used the Excel computer program to carry it out.
Professor of composition at the Institut del Teatre, Pérez Galí uses the structures of poetry and music to carry out this reflection. Thus, each of these short pieces corresponds to a different way of approaching composition: a sonnet, a sestina – the medieval form that reminded him of a score by Lucinda Childs – or a palindrome… but also a fugue. , a folía, the Phrygian mode or the pentatonic scale. Small poems within a global drama that is the cyclical idea of ??the day, from the moment the sun rises until it rises again.
“I studied the violin for ten years as a child and now I have started playing the piano for three years, and I have to say that learning as an adult has allowed me to understand the training strategies and methods. So I have seen how some of the logic “They had their parallels with choreography. Alba is a way of transferring compositional methodologies from poetic or musical language to dance and vice versa,” says the 42-year-old artist.
Ten years have passed since his performative conference Sweating the Discourse in which he spoke about the figure of the dancer. She was followed by The Touching Community, about AIDS, and Èpica, with which she completed a trilogy on discourse where she worked on dance from a critical theory. But if in Èpica there was a lot of darkness, she now shines light in Alba, the first work that she directed but no longer performs, which has been a challenge.
Pérez Galí comments on some of those poems that five performers will put on stage, with a yellow triangle and a white square as the only scenographic materials, apart from the lights (by Oscila) and the costumes (Pedra). It starts from a prelude, Cor de l’albada, a circular palindrome that the dancers expose in the form of a canon and that is inspired by the minimalist structure of the American composer Tom Johnson (1939).
But he also uses poems by Joan Brossa – that Mirall sextine that the artist dedicated to Schönberg and which has been set to music specially for Alba -, texts by Maria Mercè Marçal – from Terra de mai, the first book in Catalan about lesbian love – or in the sound archive of Maria Arnal, who collaborates by reading a poem.
The video dance piece El mar that Àngels Margarit herself, the current director of the Mercat de les Flors, made in 1990 down the coast of Miramar with music by Agustí Fernández, is another source of inspiration. And even the somatic Feldenkrais method is very present, which through minimal movements releases tension, aligns the body and gives freedom of movement. For the latter, he has had the collaboration of a professor of this system that the Israeli physicist Moshe Feldenkrais devised in the 20th century, the former French dancer Samuel Letellier, based in Barcelona and also a professor at the Institut del Teatre.
“Feldenkrais is not dance, but it has a total connection, because Aimar is also very focused on the quality of the movement in this piece,” explains Letellier leaving a practice with the Alba dancers. She has been with them for five weeks now. “Today I told them to observe how the ingredient we worked on entered the work. And it really changes a lot.”
In a type of dance that includes the release technique, as is the case with Alba, the Feldenkrais method fits in an almost miraculous way, since it is about reducing muscle tone, working from the bones, reducing effort… and achieving elegant movements. The physicist never worked with dancers, but he did with Peter Brook’s theater company. In any case, it is today a daily practice among groups of dancers in Tel Aviv.
“I see it as a tool that can help them understand and inhabit the movements better, to take care of the quality of all of them and to tune in to the textures. But it also allows me to ask them to forget about technique and get closer to who they are. “concludes Letellier.
