De voz, un cuerpo is a performance project with four musicians and a dancer. Together they will compose a sound track based on research begun by Leonor Leal at the end of 2022. This sound track will be the fruit of a free interpretation of the testimonies of women (former flamenco dancers) who described to Leonor their inner images as they danced.

There are few texts written by flamenco dancers, rather than essays on dance or biographies. There are few bodies that have published their internal images, based on their personal observations that have helped them to dance better. Practice is full of tangible material for our bodies, words that resonate one day in our learning process and change our vision, lines of light, lines on the floor, in sound, on our skins, ideas, sensations, temporary parameters, silences, gestures, prayers, invocations of other bodies, melodies, remedies and even entire conversations in the solitude of our bodies on this art that has always seemed from the outside to be mute.

L'ARREPLEGADA is a cultural and social inter-disciplinary festival. The first was held in 2022. It is organised by the group La Verema, in close collaboration with L’animal a l’esquena, where the event takes place. The festival covers a wide range of artistic disciplines, from performance arts, graphic plastic arts, visual arts and literary arts to music.

The aim is to provide a kaleidoscopic and plural space in which to share, get to know and encourage the work of young and emerging artists. The gathering hopes to be a catalyst, offering a creative interchange between the participants, who come from a variety of branches of creation, thus encouraging the formation of a decentralised and active artistic network.

Beltenebros is a choreographic project by Javier Martín, in a variety of settings as regards art, performance, sound and installation, which embodies themes such as the syndrome of the cancellation of the future of the post modern identity and its techno-religious leanings, in a critical analysis of the background noise of our age, as an effect of the inertia of cognitive rituals that now lack any communal significance. Beltenebros considers the reinterpretation of the dysphoric body, familiar to our times, through practice with anatomical votive offerings - representations in wax, metal or wood of different organs and other parts of the body - and the installation on stage of a particular “hangman’s game” as a framework for the action and its pauses; not showing the game or the votive rites, but producing alternative meanings through them. Each offering makes, with the sound, an approach to the body, a kinetic situation. This is a dance of the macabre in collaboration with the pianist Haruna Takebe and the camerawoman-performer Masako Hattori.

Intensive workshop for the pupils of two American universities, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, headed by Donna Faye, and Stockton University, New Jersey, also including students from the Instituto del Teatro in Barcelona. The workshop will be run by Albert Quesada and Leo Castro (who works for L’animal a l’esquena), in collaboration with the arts centres Fabra y Coats, El Granero de Barcelona and the Institutio del Teatro in Barcelona.

CUERPOS CELESTES/HEAVENLY BODIES
a documentary project of science and fiction.

In this residency AZKONATOLOZA will continue researching their new piece CUERPOS CELESTES, the second part of FALLA, a new series of live arts research projects by these two artists.

After eight years travelling around Abya Yala with our Trilogía Pacífico, tracing the cracks left by colonialism and capitalist barbarism on the life of the planet, delving into the consequences of unregulated extraction and the geopolitical relationships that underpin all this, our questions were piling up:

Now what? Where are we headed?
What surface should we scour?
Which voices should we listen to?

The first clue was to be found in the last verse of Teatro Amazonas: “Now, what we have to do is stop and listen.”

Listening was the starting point for the new journey we embarked on with Canto Mineral, the opening piece of FALLA, the series of documentary research, speculative reality and science fiction that we are currently involved in. Because after years giving our attention to human stories and voices, who should we listen to now?

What if it wasn’t the humans, or the animals, or even the trees that would have the last word, as Joan Brossa wrote? What if it was the stones, the minerals or the electromagnetic waves?

ncubatio es a piece that combines dance, music, models of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and techniques of movement capture as part of a performance.
Incubatio is based on the archaic practice of the same name, which had its roots in Western Asia, on the distant fringes of the eastern Greek world.
A cure that consisted in lying down in a sacred place, a cave or temple, so as to enter into a state beyond everyday consiousness until you had a vision or powerful dream. Inspired by this practice, Incubatio is a performance piece that recreates these archetypal dreams or visions, with the help of innovative technology especially designed for this project. The piece combines dance, interactive music and visual imagerey.

Perder la cabeza is a choreographic project for unconventional spaces, created and directed by Mariantònia Oliver, with the performer and dancer Alejandra Balboa and a soundscape created with Joana Gomila.
It is a piece of research into origins, ancestry, the roots that pull us towards the earth and give us the strength to fly.
It is a reflection on the different layers that limit, and define, the human condition and its embodiment. It reveals how the exterior and artificial ends up imposing an image of ourselves within us.

A piece of research into origings, ancestry, the roots that pull us into the earth and give us the strength to fly … a mane of hair inhabited by a mythological being, the symbiosis between our animal and sensual natures …a process of growth.

Mal Pelo offers a workshop in which to try out the mechanisms of action and what they may unleash. A look at movement and writing with the body in action.

Precision, duration, commitment, intensity, silence, absence, presence, punctuation, habitability, surrender, phrasing, punctuation, linearity, temporality, musicality, rhythm, writing - these are some of the terms that we shall be questioning during this course.

Activate:
Carry out an action.
Carry out movements and gestures to make something understood.
Activate a mechanism.

Mal Pelo workshops are given by the company’s two co-directors, though both may not be present at any given session.

detalls

Los informalls are addicted to risk, to taking the difficult path, throwing themselves into the abyss of facing up to everything beyond their control and all life’s struggles, breaking out of their comfort zone and treading the very limit of their capabilities. The aim of their new piece is to return to play and exploration of the ridiculous as research methods. This time their starting point is the hypothetical creation of a musical album … only fate will decide how this all ends. A possible premier in 2023, at the very least!

De voz, un cuerpo is a performance project with four musicians and a dancer. Together they will compose a sound track based on research begun by Leonor Leal at the end of 2022. This sound track will be the fruit of a free interpretation of the testimonies of women (former flamenco dancers) who described to Leonor their inner images as they danced.

There are few texts written by flamenco dancers, rather than essays on dance or biographies. There are few bodies that have published their internal images, based on their personal observations that have helped them to dance better. Practice is full of tangible material for our bodies, words that resonate one day in our learning process and change our vision, lines of light, lines on the floor, in sound, on our skins, ideas, sensations, temporary parameters, silences, gestures, prayers, invocations of other bodies, melodies, remedies and even entire conversations in the solitude of our bodies on this art that has always seemed from the outside to be mute.

Después de más de 5 años de colaboraciones de Mal Pelo con Joel Bardolet en diferentes de las propuestas creativas del grupo, Joel Bardolet propone ahora a María Muñoz i Pep Ramis una colaboración artística con Trío Fortuny, un programa especial sobre La noche transfigurada de Schönberg.

VICINI is a creation traversed by different practices and tools for movement improvisation, objects manipulation and writing.

Throughout the residency periods, the team organizes open workshops to share these tools and to generate a dialogue springing from the physical experience of the materials they are investigating.

The workshops are a space for participative and guided explorations based on somatic practices and concepts such as the dialogue between bodies through contact or an object that connects them, the forces of attraction and repulsion that this may generate, and the structural imbalance in relation to an interdependent stability.

We invite you to the next meetings on the 22nd and 23rd of April, from 6.30pm to 9.00pm, at L'animal a l'esquena.

Notes:
Limited places. ?For more information and to join the laboratory write to federica.porello@gmail.com

VICINI (from the Italian "near" or "neighbours"), is born from the attempt to create an elastic and sensitive structure where to perceive how individual and group actions are constantly interwoven with their environment.
Through gestures, words and objects, the 4 performers on stage speak of the parallelism and the connection between the "inside" and the "outside", between the perceivable, the speakable and the imaginable, between the senses, the thoughts and the internal poetics of a body-singular and a body-crowd.

From October 8th 2023, witnessing the escalation of brutalities inflicted on the Palestinian people, artistic and political reflections began to weave inseparably.
In the network of connections, affectations and parallelisms between near and far events, sprang the impulse to extend our gaze to the east and approach the testimonies and poems of resilience and resistance.

"From what wind have you come?
Tell me the name of your wound and I’ll know
the road we got lost twice!"
("Mural" Mahmoud Darwish)

Mal Pelo proposes a laboratory researching the language of movement and its transmission.
A group of people of different ages and backgrounds will meet to share their tools for working with movement, text, composition, musicality and space.
Transmission is always in two directions, from one body to another, enriching the vocabulary and the vision of each of them.

As his final piece of work for his training at SEADS university in Austria, Martí Ramis will work on an adapatation of the 2017 Mal Pelo show The Mountain, Truth and Paradise. He will be accompanied in this process by Pep Ramis, creator and performer of the piece.

As a part of the final graduation for SEAD, Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, Jacob Gregersen will do an adapted version of the piece Bach from Mal Pelo. Under the guidance of Maria Muñoz, the creator of the solo work, the piece will be transformed and transmitted in the
first week of April and performed in SEAD in the last week of June.

In Greek mythology, the titan Epimetheus is given the mission of inventing a natural shield for each of the newly born animals. So Epimetheus decides to give spines to the hedgehogs, poison to the snakes, ink to the squids, quick feet to the hares… Once he has finished his task, and after he has sent each and every one of the animals off to Zeus, he realises that he has forgotten one creature, the stupidest and clumsiest, to whom he has nothing left to offer as protection: the human, who remains naked and vulnerable against the hostility of the world.

AFTER será el cuarto largometraje de este cineasta y representa la culminación de una evolución: realizar películas de fuerte convicción artística, con inspiración y calado popular. Con vocación de público, servicio. Con vocación de democratizar el cine de autor. Ser pedagógico con el público sin caer en el tono ilustrativo o paternalista.

PESO Muerto, de Anna Maria Ricart, es el noveno montaje escénico de MeriYanes Producciones. Esta vez busca la complicidad con la Cía. Elena Martinell para poder crear un espectáculo multidisciplinario, con escenas híbridas, donde confluirán el teatro de texto, el canto lírico y la música de autor.

Este proyecto nace de la necesidad de habla de los trastornos de conducta alimentaria (TCA). Una vez pasada la pandemia, los casos de trastornos alimentarios han aumentado mucho, sobre todo entre las adolescentes. Pero estos trastornos no solo afectan la gente joven. Hay un sector, mayoritariamente mujeres, de más de 30 años, que también lo sufren y quedan abandonadas por la sanidad pública, puesto que la mayoría de recursos destinados a curar estas enfermedades están destinados a menores de 25 años. La única manera de superar los trastornos alimentarios, en la mayoría de los casos, es a partir de la sanidad privada, haciendo que la curación dependa de si la enferma tiene recursos económicos propios.

Meritxell Colell i Angélica Castelló vuelven a L’animal con su proyecto “Lejos de los árboles” Una propuesta cinematográfica que narra el viaje épico de una artista que teje un mapa sonoro de la Amazonia en los Andes peruanos para habla del luto, los miedos, los sueños, la herencia del exilio y el desarraigo. Una historia llena de historias, un film que reivindica la necesidad de volvernos a explicar historias, de escuchar, de ser receptoras de memoria. Un viaje iniciático a través de la escucha.

En esta ocasión, la residencia acabará con un rodaje que servirá como elemento de investigación para la búsqueda de financiación y productoras para continuar este proyecto en el 2025.

PESO Muerto, de Anna Maria Ricart, es el noveno montaje escénico de MeriYanes Producciones. Esta vez busca la complicidad con la Cía. Elena Martinell para poder crear un espectáculo multidisciplinario, con escenas híbridas, donde confluirán el teatro de texto, el canto lírico y la música de autor.

Este proyecto nace de la necesidad de habla de los trastornos de conducta alimentaria (TCA). Una vez pasada la pandemia, los casos de trastornos alimentarios han aumentado mucho, sobre todo entre las adolescentes. Pero estos trastornos no solo afectan la gente joven. Hay un sector, mayoritariamente mujeres, de más de 30 años, que también lo sufren y quedan abandonadas por la sanidad pública, puesto que la mayoría de recursos destinados a curar estas enfermedades están destinados a menores de 25 años. La única manera de superar los trastornos alimentarios, en la mayoría de los casos, es a partir de la sanidad privada, haciendo que la curación dependa de si la enferma tiene recursos económicos propios.

“Practiquem i estudiem això tant intangible i fulminant de la improvisació.
Tenim una llista de desitjos, una herència de llenguatge, una confusió de temps verbals, dobles personalitats, una cantant que no hi és mai. Fem trampes, escrivim i parlem molt en serio. Ens il·luminem i perdem tota èpica en un mateix matí. I sabem segur que
si neva, no venim.”
Glòria Ros

Aquest és un projecte d’investigació i experimentació sobre la disciplina de la improvisació, enfocada en els camps del moviment i el so. Planteja un estudi interdisciplinari d’aquesta pràctica com a fet escènic especí?c i autònom, entenent la pràctica mateixa com a font de coneixement i pensament. Es tracta d’una recerca col·lectivitzada impulsada per la ballarina Glòria Ros, en col·laboració amb les següents artistes improvisadores: Celeste Alías (veu), Clara Lai (piano), Joan Cot (electrònica), Ariadna Torner (violí), les ballarines Anna Fontanet, Miquel Fiol, Ona Fusté, Iver Zapata, Milagros García, Majo Villafaina i Glòria Ros, i la càmera-performer Mila Ercoli.

Terra de fuga és el títol que porta el treball de final de grau de la Paula Ramis. És un solo de format curt on explora què és per a ella un paisatge i la relació d’aquests i la identitat de les persones, espais i temporalitats. A través del moviment del cos, veu, música i traç desitja descobrir i viatjar a través de les infinites capes en constant transformació que creen paisatges, des dels més coneguts fins als imaginaris.

Durant aquesta setmana de residència a L’animal a l’esquena Martí i Ari han iniciat el procés de re-imaginar i refer la peça que van presentar l’any 2023 al festival L’Arreplegada. Durant la residència han treballat en un format de laboratori, en què han provat diferents propostes a nivell compositiu, estètic, plàstic i de moviment, que servirà de base per continuar amb la construcció d’una nova peça.

Un proyecto de artes escénicas que combina características del teatro visual, la danza y el teatro de objetos. Son tres intérpretes y cuarenta y siete tejas antiguas. Las intérpretes manipulan las tejas, construyen arquitecturas en movimiento y exploran el sonido producido por sus acciones. Hay una negociación entre el cuerpo y la materia, entre la piel y las tejas, entre la rugosidad, la fragilidad y el peso. De una en una [versos sobre un tejado errante] es fascinación por la artesanía y el trabajo rural, es trabajo en equipo y es, a la vez, una apuesta por la poética del silencio y los paisajes en transformación. Una pieza que suele habitar las sombras y los rincones de la ciudad: claustros, patios, fábricas abandonadas, solares en reconstrucción...

DesembrEnDansa (Dance December) is a season dedicated to performance arts related to the body and movement, set up in 2016 with the aim of putting Celrà at the epicentre of cutting edge dance. It offers a broad range of shows, training and creation around dance and movement, lasting three days, which hopes to highlight the town’s long history of both training and creative projects since the 1990s.

The season, which involves various institutions in the town related to dance, is held every December. Every year we work to bring this discipline to the whole population, young and old.
The aim is to decentralise dance from large urban centres, such as Barcelona or Gerona, spreading this artistic language throughout the land.

Celrà’s long association with this discipline has made it a beacon for contemporary dance, especially due to the presence of la Escuela de Municipal de Danza (Municipal Dance School) and the creation centre L’animal a l’esquena.

This is a season that emphasises the value of dance as an artistic expression using the movement of the body as a universal language. The programme, always aimed at the general public, is noted for its quality and professionalism, with proposals that focus on the creative process, artistic training, and the performance of dance pieces by local artists. The fact that most of the programme takes place in the open air helps it reach the widest possible audience.

DesembreEnDansa takes place in various locations in the town of Celrà and is organised by the Área de Cultura del Ayuntamiento, the Teatro L'Ateneu, the Escuela Municipal de Danza de Celrà and L’animal a l’esquena.

More info: https://www.celracultura.cat/ca/agenda-desembredansa.html

To scroll is to displace, vertically or horizontally, the contents of a web page, application, video game etc. Scrolling means rapidly changing shape, the technical solution that allows us to see all the contents of a web page or app on one physical screen, limited in size. SCROLL is a journey between reality and virtual fiction, considering human relationships within these two worlds and asking how the virtual world becomes the real one. The idea is to reflect on how human relationships have changed in the presence of IT, how progress is linked to technological advances and how these distance us from reality, from tangible, earthly history. Freud, in his book “Civilization and its Discontents”, said that thanks to the aeroplane we can travel and thanks to the telephone we can communicate over thousands of miles, but asks whether this communication is necessary. Are these invented needs? Is it a sign of progress or if these advances did not exist, would we have a more personal, present communication? What if we apply the same formula to social networks? What would happen if this intelligible world were to disappear from one day to the next? What would be left? Do we live in two worlds, with two identities? Are we really aware of our own decision?

CUERPOS CELESTES
un proyecto documental de ciencia y ficción.

En esta residencia AZKONATOLOZA seguirán investigando en su nueva creación CUERPOS CELESTES, la segunda parte de FALLA, la nueva serie de investigación en artes vivas de estas dos creadoras.

Porque tras ocho años recorriendo Abya Yala, de la mano de la Trilogía Pacífico, en busca de las grietas dejadas por el colonialismo y la barbarie capitalista sobre la vida en el planeta, buceando en las consecuencias del extractivismo desregulado y en las relaciones geopolíticas que enraízan todo esto, las preguntas se agolpaban:
Y ahora, ¿qué? ¿hacia dónde vamos?
¿Qué superficie debemos rastrear?
¿Qué voces debemos escuchar?

Paula Sacur viene a L’animal a realizar una residencia de investigación-creación en artes vivas, que involucre a la comunidad migratoria, tanto para una investigación de campo, como para ser parte de la puesta en escena. Reunirse en la diáspora de los cuerpos a partir de un lenguaje corporal particular, donde cada interprete será autor/a de su corporalidad, gesto poético como un sello identitario, a través de las prácticas de autoría, metodología que he desarrollado durante su trayectoria como investigadora chilena en danza, somática y política. Crear corporalidades que sean testimonio autobiográfico (auto-etnográfico), desde la memoria somática-cultural- Ancestral.

Ana Valles
Nuria Sotelo

Dos mujeres y L'animal a l'esquena
Dos mujeres, un espacio donde encontrarnos. El deseo de sorprendernos huyendo de lo planificado. Buscando lo inesperado, algo que nos enamore, aunque sea solo por un instante.
Un paisaje ... un burro...una sombra ... un reflejo
Lo mejor que podemos hacer es callar. No afirmar nada, no dar explicación alguna quizás para no meter la pata.
¿¿¿Cómo poder contar en pocas palabras lo que aún no conocemos???

“De voz, un cuerpo” es una propuesta escénica con 4 músicos y una bailaora. Entre todos componen una banda sonora a partir de un proceso de investigación iniciado por Leonor Leal a finales de 2022. Esta banda sonora será fruto de una interpretación libre a partir de los testimonios de mujeres (exbailaoras de flamenco) que contaron a Leonor sus imágenes internas al bailar.

Arquitecturas invisibles es un proyecto artístico que Carolina coordina con un colectivo transdisciplinario desde el 2016, con el fin de generar conocimiento en torno a espacios arquitectónicos a partir de prácticas contemporáneas. La metodología utilizada plantea marcos concretos de trabajo en torno al espacio, desde lo sonoro y sensible de la experiencia de habitarlo. Se priorizan las metodologías colectivas de investigación, focalizando el compartir y el traducir la experiencia de un colectivo desde lo singular de cada participante. Al tener como objeto de estudio el espacio arquitectónico, este se transforma en una plataforma de relación para generar conocimiento a partir de lo dado.

La última propuesta escénica de la compañía Dejabu, será una road-movie existencialista donde se mezclan viajes psicodélicos, los cárteles del aguacate y el rapto de un chihuahua como única manera de sobrevivir.

Urko, Ainara y Miren, miembros de la compañía, en un ejercicio de autoficción y narrado con un lenguaje cinematográfico, nos cuentan cómo sumergidos en una crisis vital y creativa, acabaron perdidos en el desierto mexicano.

Como es habitual en la compañía, la exploración del lenguaje escénico transitará entre el teatro de objetos, teatro gestual y la creación de paisajes oníricos que creen un universo poético propio.

BAR/GOMA/BAR, la segunda producción de Teatro Anatómico, explora escénicamente las zonas liminales y los espacios de tránsito entre los comienzos y los finales de las cosas. ¿Cuándo empieza algo a ser o a dejar de ser? ¿Dónde colocamos los límites que dan sentido a lo que somos, a lo que nos rodea? ¿Qué jalones individuales o colectivos van organizando los itinerarios de nuestras vidas? ¿Cómo marcamos las fronteras que definen la materialidad de las acciones y disciplinas artísticas?

El Bar Goma está situado frente al Cementerio de San Fernando, el Hospital de San Lázaro y el Tanatorio SE30 de Sevilla. Abrió en 1951 y se llamó así por un vertedero de neumáticos que antes ocupaba el mismo lugar. El cartel icónico del establecimiento reza «BAR GOMA BAR». Son célebres las frases de sus azucarillos para el café: «Aquí se está mejor que allí», «Al que le toca le toca». A un costado, Mármoles Herrera proporciona tumbas, panteones y servicios de restauración de sepulcros. ¿Qué pasaría si colocásemos a Tadeusz Kantor en el Bar Goma, mirando al cementerio, al hospital, al tanatorio? ¿Cómo podría ser hoy un Teatro de la Muerte, con su espectralidad memorialística, pero despojado de su forma original, proyectado a otras formas en el presente?

The Kif Kif collective return to L’animal, this time with a proposal that brings in other members of the family: a father, a sister, brothers. A piece about transmission between two generations, returning the father to the world of his children and viceversa. Playing with this filial relationship and all the mythical meanings it carries, twisting and inverting it. Having fun with the generation gap but also with the appearance of bodies. Using shared experience, memories of holidays, established routines to reveal this family world and blow it up in a joyful search for the absolute.

Mythical figures and ancient tragedies. It’s a case of taking all the familiar patterns from Greek and Roman tragedy and bending the fixed codes of the lines followed by myth. As in a family, the characters in tragedy each have a predetermined role to play: Antigone, Polynices and Eteocles, Oedipus, Iphigenea and Agamemnon…

Time is distorted. How long do you have to wait for death? For how long have we been absent? Playing with the differences in rhythm between a long wait and the explosion of a failed experiment. Provoking discontinuities, interferences and sparks to find the absurd in waiting, the clown of silence…

What do we do with the lives we don’t want?
Who has the access to be well in a world that is so sick?

The idea comes from the conflict produced when two realities meet, clash, coincide at the same spot with different points of view. How the drive of a body adapts to situations it cannot conceive. It’s as if reason were escaping from reason.

Who has the power to change your view? Is it difficult to try to perceive another reality with empathy? The perception of a reality should not be called into question. So, how do we relate to each other?

You really don’t understand an antagonist until you understand that he or she is the protagonist of his or her own version of the world. There are two sides to every story.

This is a dialogue between two different languages, sound and body, presenting two different experiences in relation to artistic creation. The coexistence of these two poetic visions can create flow or conflict. How do they live together in dialogue, knowing that there are as many versions of any one accident as witnesses who have seen it happen?

Bhum! is back! (Human Frontiers Manifesto)
This seventh Bhum! is returning after three years of pause for the pandemic. This next event will be special as L’animal a l’esquena will now have the large space of the totally renovated farmhouse at its disposal. Thanks to a grant from the Direcció General del Patrimoni de la Generalitat de Catalunya, we can now use various spaces in the farmhouse prepared for activities and also a restored public area with toilets and kitchen that were not there before. These new spaces will allow us to provide a better quality, though more limited service.

This Bhum! will be attended by artists, technicians and volunteers generously giving their time to support L’animal and its place on the cultural map of the country.

Since the last Bhum! in 2019, we have adapted L’animal’s project after a period of great difficulty for the arts. The situation is still not easy but we want to reclaim our plans and, thanks to the support of many people, we resume Bhum!, a Manifesto, a Showcase, a Party, but above all the moment in the year when L’animal a l’esquena shares with the public the work of artists who have taken part in our creative programmes.

We will share the artistic proposals of LosInformalls, Cecilia Colacrai, Meritxell Colell, Mal Pelo, Tristán Pérez-Martín, Mariantònia Oliver, Baró d’Evel Cirk Cie, Xavi Bobés, Milagros García, Enric Ases, Andrés Corchero, Clara Peya, Miquel Fiol and Dani Claret, Leonor Leal and Antonio Moreno, Martí and Paula Ramis, Jana Castro, Enric Fàbregas, Marta Izquierdo, Jaume Guri, Bernat, Quiteria Muñoz, among others.

ES PECADO QUE UNA VERGEN RÍA CON DESCARO/IT’S A SIN FOR A VIRGIN TO HAVE A BRAZEN LAUGH is a piece inspired by the walled women, also known as recluses and/or anchoresses. The anchoresses were part of a political movement of female liberation during the Low Middle Ages in Europe and were women who decided to withdraw from the outside world, walled up in small cells in the urban centres of the time. These cells provide a whole world of images that feed into the drama of this piece: the image of a room that is open and closed at the same time. The stage is transformed into a cell in which the body of the performer is offered as an act of presence and resistance.

Los informalls are addicted to risk, to taking the difficult path, throwing themselves into the abyss of facing up to everything beyond their control and all life’s struggles, breaking out of their comfort zone and treading the very limit of their capabilities. The aim of their new piece is to return to play and exploration of the ridiculous as research methods. This time their starting point is the hypothetical creation of a musical album … only fate will decide how this all ends. A possible premier in 2023, at the very least!

What happens when a woman bursts into territory that has traditionally been dominated by men? What happens when it is women who take action in the public sphere? These questions are the triggers for the project I am presenting to you. Songs for the Bitch-Witch Women is a performance project based on my interest in understanding how the mechanism works that regulates what can and cannot be said in public and, above all, in front of an audience. Among all the tools that enable this hierarchy, I am especially interested in focussing on words, because these are, and have been, a crucial element for the construction of the story of “reality” and for the control and regulation of public and private life. This piece aims, then, to generate another word on stage; a way of building using my own voice.

Our investigation involves launching our heroes into outer space. Following two astronauts as they draw away from Earth, the spectator can immerse him or herself with our heroes in the world of transformation they are experiencing.
The idea of this project is to create for the spectator the sensation of holding back or changing the course of time, through which we understand our inescapable need to know our body, mind and spirit and ask ourselves about science and spirituality. The most important element in the research process for this piece is Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain”

ALBA is a dance and piano recital, but it is also a publication of choreographies and a study of literary, choreographical and musical language and the tricks of its composition. This piece deals with composition and form as a theme in itself, finding intertextual dialogues to and fro between words, movement and sound.

The start of the collaboration between these two artists and peformers, creating a duet that will develop into a piece to be performed in 2024.

L’animal continues to support young artists from the region, a line of work begun a few years ago that we hope to expand in future. The artistic and creative standards of the dancers of Celrà (Gerona) require support at the moment when they leave training to enter the professional world.

A two day workshop focussing on instantaneous composition and gangster films (following on from their recent piece Casa Nostra). The workshop will finish with a performance by all the particpants, open to the public.
SLMFV’s performance improvisation workshops provide a space for investigation and experimentation with the tools that enrich and free artists when they face composing in real time. Taking as their starting point their recent piece Casa Nostra, the aim is to offer a space for physical practice where the body will set out to invent instantaneously in relation to the poetic world of gangster film.
They will share their study of dance improvisation: a practice to develop the sense of stage presence in a technical and multidirectional way. SLMFV describe stage presence as a state of readiness and creative responsibility, physical power and risk-taking performance. All these elements will be put into play in relation to different stage variables (in this case sound and costume) as part of a collective creation and for one basic audience: the public.

This is aimed at everyone interested in improvisation and who wants to learn more about the work of Si Los Martes Fueran Viernes.


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Second edition of the interdisciplinary meeting L'ARREPLEGADA organized by the collective La Verema and L'animal a l'esquena.
You can sign up via https://entradium.com/events/l-arreplegada for confirmation and contribute to the grant for this event. This voucher gives access to all the events, but the capacity of the study hall is limited.

6.30pm: welcome
6.45pm: exhibition opening and live performances at the farmhouse
19h30: site specific exteriors
8:00 p.m.: performances in the studio
9.30pm: site specific exteriors
10:00 p.m.: concerts and performances at open air
Bar service and food provided by NIMU de Celrà

For a second year L’animal a l’esquena will host L’ARREPLEGADA, a project by La Varema, a group of young artists from Celrà, which also includes artists from different artistic backgrounds in the area.

L’ARREPLEGADA is an arts event made up of a showcase for performance arts, an exhibition of graphic-plastic arts and music, with the aim of offering a space to share and learn about the work of young artists from the area. The gathering is intended to encourage creative communication between the participants, belonging to a range of creative disciplines and fields, and so promote the creation of a local artistic network. This event also aims to help raise awareness of the arts centre L’animal a l’esquena and its surroundings among the young people of the region.

For two weeks the collective will engage in various activities:

- Creation: For the first week, La Varema will hold a creation residency to develop the collective’s own artistic projects. The aim of this residency is to make a small sample/piece of work during the week, together with the collective Si Los Martes Fueran Viernes (SLMFV). There will be a public performance on the day of the ARREPLEGADA.
- Training: La Varema will invite the collective Si Los Martes Fueran Viernes (SLMFV) to give an intensive workshop over the weekend 15th-16th July, with a public display at 5pm on 16th July.
- Stimulation: During the second week, the collective will open up their research to other young artists, both from the world of performance and music, and from that of plastic and installation art. La Varema will prepare and organise the event and put artists in contact with each other so as to encourage creative exchange.
- Communication: On 22nd July, La Varema, with the support of L’animal a l’esquena and Cultura Celrà, will put on various events in and around L’animal. In 2023 L’animal will have the farm at Mas Espolla at its disposal as a space for creation and exhibitions. On this day it will be used to show the work of these young artists as part of a playful, festive event.
- This will consist of elements in various formats, such as encounters with the public, exhibitions, concerts and site-specific pieces, so as to promote communication between artists, organisers and the public.

PATINAGE/SKATING is a project under development, based on people’s archives of figure skating. Looking back at these images of her teenage years and the memories they bring, Priscilla Guy asks how sport has left an emotional and physical trace of identity in her body and her memory. By hacking these archives and producing new images, placed in surreal settings, PATINAGE offers a poetic and accidental journey through different sound, visual and sensory textures. An exalted self-portrait, PATINAGE can perhaps be located somewhere between documentary, surrealism and science fiction.

The title V is neither the letter nor the Roman numeral but the image of a flying seagull.

This project is for the creation of a show of dance, physical theatre, art and live music, about 50 minutes long, with a dance performer, Patricia Hastewell Puig, and a cellist, Oscar Alabau Fernández, on stage.

V unfolds in a dream space. It deals with fears and desires, the human need to leave a mark for fear of disappearing, the ephemeral nature of life and the perpetuity of art. It has an existentialist strand, as-king questions about the human condition and the meaning of life. It is inspired by Beckett’s theatre of the absurd in “Waiting for Godot” and the expressionism of Russian painter Marc Chagall. It counter-points the ephemeral nature of dance with venerable pieces of music by Johann Sebastian Bach and György Ligeti. It also juxtaposes different disciplines, such as dance, music and art, and works created in different centuries, revealing how contemporary they are in their art, how authentic their humanity, how the same themes keep being repeated as the centuries go by.
V gives a voice to the body, to fantasy, and presents itself as a kind of performance manifesto. It starts with the tangible, the body, matter, to reach into the world of the imagination. This piece is the internal monologue of a body that speaks and explains what it has experienced, or imagined. A solitary body playing with the imagination and changing its point of view in search of answers.
What are we doing here? The figure symbolises the passing of time, the search for a belief that could make sense of life or of its existance, and these themes are handled with humour and a sense of the absurd.

V will be premiered on 26th October 2023 at the Dansat Festival at the SAT theatre in Barcelona.

“Això al poble no li agradarà”, vol convertir-se en un punt de trobada entre públics i creació contemporània. Un espai capaç de generar noves formes de relació entre els espectadors i espectadores i aquelles pràctiques artístiques contemporànies que dialoguen amb el context. El festival proposa un desplaçament del pol cultural, un exercici de reterritorialització que posa en valor la creació híbrida connectant artistes, espais i públics.
Un nou festival d’arts vives a les comarques gironines.

De l'1 al 4 de juny Olot, Mieres, Porqueres, Banyoles, Girona, Celrà, Lloret de Mar, La Jonquera i Figueres son els municipis que acolliran l'edició zero del nou festival impulsat per diferents agents artístics i equipaments culturals de titularitat pública de les comarques gironines.
11 propostes artístiques ocuparan els espais d'Olot Cultura, l'Espai Nyamnyam, el Centre Cívic de Porqueres, de Cultura Banyoles, del Teatre Municipal de Girona, de Celrà Fàbrica d’Arts, del Teatre de Lloret de Mar, de La Jonquera Cultura i de Figueres a Escena.
El festival compta, també, amb el suport de diversos agents del territori com ara El Bòlit, Centre d'Art Contemporani de Girona, El Canal, Centre de creació d'arts escèniques i L'animal a l'esquena a més del suport de la Generalitat de Catalunya, la Diputació de Girona i el Consell Comarcal de l'Alt Empordà.

Més informació a www.aixoalpoblenoliagradara.cat/

El dia 3 de juny Marga Socias & Els Mals Endreços presentaran a L’animal ORELLES, una experiència participativa sobre l’escolta. ORELLES (Organisme Rural d’Exploració Lliure d’Escoltes Singulars) és un projecte sonor inèdit i emocionant. En una caravana coneguda com ‘La-capsa-humana-de-música’, dos músics interpreten materials d’autoria pròpia mentre una investigadora analitza cada peça i la forma en què aquesta pot ser escoltada.

Els subjectes som totes, els músics i les que escolten. L’objecte és el so, la música i les cançons. I darrere de tot plegat un intent de subvertir l’escolta compulsiva i orientar, a qui tingui interès, cap a una escolta conscient.
Un espectacle-concert o un concert-espectacle que es presenta com un procés d’investigació on el públic és convidat a participar lliurement de les diferents proves-experiències que es van proposant.

Consulteu la web www.aixoalpoblenoliagradara.cat/ per a la compra d’entrades. Dinar més espectacle a les 15h o segon passi a les 19h.

Duet by María Muñoz and Pep Ramis

Throughout our time making group creations, we have given ourselves space to meet on stage, just the two of us, a place to delve into and discover new realms of language, ideas about performance and dramatic composition. That is how we came to create Quarere (1989), L’animal a l’esquena (2001) and El Cinquè Hivern (2015), three pieces far apart in time that have been turning points in our performance quest.

It is this that leads us to create Double Infinite. The Bluebird Call. A fresh encounter between the two creators of Mal Pelo, to construct a piece out of fragility, simplicity and our love for this profession, that still poses questions for us. About ourselves, about the individual, identity, the group and our surroundings. And about the body, the great revealer of our own potential.

Una rave demencial en medio de las áridas y fantasmagóricas montañas del sur de Marruecos. Raveros danzando al ritmo excesivo de las descargas electrónicas y de los ácidos.

En medio de la fiesta irrumpe el ejército anunciando que todos los europeos deben ser urgentemente deportados a sus países de origen. Algunos raveros tratan de resistirse, otros se dejan
llevar, perdidos en sus viajes interiores. Entre ellos un grupo logra escapar: han decidido seguir por su cuenta hacia el sur, más allá del desierto, buscando un lugar donde puedan seguir celebrando libremente sus fiestas.

En paralelo, un padre y un niño buscan de rave en rave a su hija y hermana, desaparecida hace meses. Lo último que saben de ella es que formaba parte de uno de estos grupos de nómades fiesteros.
Empujados por el destino deciden seguir a los fugados en su búsqueda de la fiesta prometida, tienen la esperanza de que en ella se encuentre Marina.

En el viaje unos y otros aprenderán a asimilar modos de vida diferentes, y un mismo modo de afrontar la muerte.

Duet by María Muñoz and Pep Ramis

Throughout our time making group creations, we have given ourselves space to meet on stage, just the two of us, a place to delve into and discover new realms of language, ideas about performance and dramatic composition. That is how we came to create Quarere (1989), L’animal a l’esquena (2001) and El Cinquè Hivern (2015), three pieces far apart in time that have been turning points in our performance quest.

It is this that leads us to create Double Infinite. The Bluebird Call. A fresh encounter between the two creators of Mal Pelo, to construct a piece out of fragility, simplicity and our love for this profession, that still poses questions for us. About ourselves, about the individual, identity, the group and our surroundings. And about the body, the great revealer of our own potential.

Thirty years after the premiere of El Triste Que Nunca Os Vido, La Ribot returns to the controversial figure of Juana I de Castilla in collaboration with the Spanish conductor and composer Asier Puga. This new proposal is based on a dialogue between La Ribot’s iconoclastic dance and the music composed by Asier Puga, inspired by the Cancionero of Juana I de Castilla.

At a time of global transformation, world pandemics, climate change that affect all territories, but also women’s liberation movements of unprecedented scale, La Ribot returns to the figure of Juana. She continues to embody a resistance, albeit impeded, to Western patriarchal oppression and its filial and matrimonial institutions. In this new approach, the idea of the couple is maintained, declined, transformed, destroyed, and questioned. The dancers will be accompanied by soloists from OCAZEnigma. The relentless movement of the setting sun will signify the eternal repetition, without escape, of Juana’s almost 16,000 days of confinement.

Duet by María Muñoz and Pep Ramis

Throughout our time making group creations, we have given ourselves space to meet on stage, just the two of us, a place to delve into and discover new realms of language, ideas about performance and dramatic composition. That is how we came to create Quarere (1989), L’animal a l’esquena (2001) and El Cinquè Hivern (2015), three pieces far apart in time that have been turning points in our performance quest.

It is this that leads us to create Double Infinite. The Bluebird Call. A fresh encounter between the two creators of Mal Pelo, to construct a piece out of fragility, simplicity and our love for this profession, that still poses questions for us. About ourselves, about the individual, identity, the group and our surroundings. And about the body, the great revealer of our own potential.

Una rave demencial en medio de las áridas y fantasmagóricas montañas del sur de Marruecos. Raveros danzando al ritmo excesivo de las descargas electrónicas y de los ácidos.

En medio de la fiesta irrumpe el ejército anunciando que todos los europeos deben ser urgentemente deportados a sus países de origen. Algunos raveros tratan de resistirse, otros se dejan
llevar, perdidos en sus viajes interiores. Entre ellos un grupo logra escapar: han decidido seguir por su cuenta hacia el sur, más allá del desierto, buscando un lugar donde puedan seguir celebrando libremente sus fiestas.

En paralelo, un padre y un niño buscan de rave en rave a su hija y hermana, desaparecida hace meses. Lo último que saben de ella es que formaba parte de uno de estos grupos de nómades fiesteros.
Empujados por el destino deciden seguir a los fugados en su búsqueda de la fiesta prometida, tienen la esperanza de que en ella se encuentre Marina.

En el viaje unos y otros aprenderán a asimilar modos de vida diferentes, y un mismo modo de afrontar la muerte.

Mertitxell Colell returns to L’animal to continue her research for the project Far From The Trees in collaboration with Angélica Castelló. After the residency in 2021 and different meetings during 2022, they return to continue working on the sound work and the script for the film. This project will continue in 2023 and 2024 in L’Animal a l’esquena.

Who do we want to become? How can we allow ourselves, despite the ruins and the evidence of disaster, to invent a story, a fiction like a ceremony to open up desirable paths? An immersive journey, a story struck by the unexpected, the present, the failures, and the stubbornness to be, to become...

V7: El problema sigue en pie/ V7: The Problem Persists is a self-produced theatre project based on research into fear and freedom of expression, the validation processes that works of art must go through and how these institutional and bureaucratic processes can affect the creation and development of artistic projects and the reaslisation of their intended message.
The piece shows two individuals in a single performance space, where they represent an eternal, reflective dialogue. On one side we find Arquiloco, in reference to the first poet to be censored in Ancient Greece, and on the other the prostitute, as a symbol of the perversion and submission of women under the patriarchal system that imposes its controlling laws. This eternal dialogue allows us to reflect on themes such as censorship, fear, freedom of expression, violence and power.
Time and the stage are represented as two diffuse elements making up a universe shared by performance and a series of texts. Some of these are by the artist herself, others inspired by and based on works of art, mainly from literature and film, all, like the documentary this is based on, censored in their time.

A local choir made up of people from different professions, backgrounds and generations decides to re-write the four movements of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. A kind of Coryphaeus who knows how drama works, helps them with the score and their moves in the performance. They don’t want to use instruments, their voices alone will carry the new experimental score. During rehearsals the group discuss the tragedies, fears and problems of society today. They reach no conclusion. What is tragedy for? What they really seek is to understand the head and body of Beethoven, the implacable deafness that totally isolated him from the world, and his desire to free humanity from something, perhaps from tragedy.

Duet by María Muñoz and Pep Ramis

Throughout our time making group creations, we have given ourselves space to meet on stage, just the two of us, a place to delve into and discover new realms of language, ideas about performance and dramatic composition. That is how we came to create Quarere (1989), L’animal a l’esquena (2001) and El Cinquè Hivern (2015), three pieces far apart in time that have been turning points in our performance quest.

It is this that leads us to create Double Infinite. The Bluebird Call. A fresh encounter between the two creators of Mal Pelo, to construct a piece out of fragility, simplicity and our love for this profession, that still poses questions for us. About ourselves, about the individual, identity, the group and our surroundings. And about the body, the great revealer of our own potential.

Mertitxell Colell returns to L’animal in a second residence for the project Far From The Trees in collaboration with Angélica Castelló. After the residency in 2021 and different meetings during 2022, they return to continue working on the sound work and the script for the film. This project will continue in 2023 and 2024 in L’Animal a l’esquena.

V7: El problema sigue en pie/ V7: The Problem Persists is a self-produced theatre project based on research into fear and freedom of expression, the validation processes that works of art must go through and how these institutional and bureaucratic processes can affect the creation and development of artistic projects and the reaslisation of their intended message.
The piece shows two individuals in a single performance space, where they represent an eternal, reflective dialogue. On one side we find Arquiloco, in reference to the first poet to be censored in Ancient Greece, and on the other the prostitute, as a symbol of the perversion and submission of women under the patriarchal system that imposes its controlling laws. This eternal dialogue allows us to reflect on themes such as censorship, fear, freedom of expression, violence and power.
Time and the stage are represented as two diffuse elements making up a universe shared by performance and a series of texts. Some of these are by the artist herself, others inspired by and based on works of art, mainly from literature and film, all, like the documentary this is based on, censored in their time.

Los informalls are addicted to risk, to taking the difficult path, throwing themselves into the abyss of facing up to everything beyond their control and all life’s struggles, breaking out of their comfort zone and treading the very limit of their capabilities. The aim of their new piece is to return to play and exploration of the ridiculous as research methods. This time their starting point is the hypothetical creation of a musical album … only fate will decide how this all ends. A possible premier in 2023, at the very least!

Duet by María Muñoz and Pep Ramis

Throughout our time making group creations, we have given ourselves space to meet on stage, just the two of us, a place to delve into and discover new realms of language, ideas about performance and dramatic composition. That is how we came to create Quarere (1989), L’animal a l’esquena (2001) and El Cinquè Hivern (2015), three pieces far apart in time that have been turning points in our performance quest.

It is this that leads us to create Double Infinite. The bluebird call. A fresh encounter between the two creators of Mal Pelo, to construct a piece out of fragility, simplicity and our love for this profession, that still poses questions for us. About ourselves, about the individual, identity, the group and our surroundings. And about the body, the great revealer of our own potential.

What are we doing with these lives that we don’t want?
What do you have to concede to the world, in this sick world?

The idea comes from the conflict generated when two realities meet, clash, coincide in the same place from different points of view. A body’s impetus adapts to situations it cannot understand. It’s as if reason were escaping reason.

Who has the power to change their way of seeing things? Is there a certain difficulty in perceiving another truth with empathy? The perception of a reality should not come into question. So, how do we relate to each other?

A danced and spoken Monologue

NOWHEN is the name of a character, immersed in his present, who reveals her multifaceted relationship with her real and imaginary environment.

A space full of things, thoughts and actions, sounds and silences, light and darkness, where everything folds and unfolds, materially or metaphorically, kindly or violently.

This performance gives value to the time of reflection, and to the search for a path, a subtle and empty line between gravity and lightness.

IDIOPHONE refers to instruments that produce their sound by the vibration of all the material they are made of, without the use of strings, membranes or air in pipes.

This proposal combines an idea of artisanship of movement with the manipulation of objects, in the construction of a sound installation in a public space. This installation is built together with the audience, who observe this dialogue between man and material (iron).

IDIOPHONE is a performance piece intended to be performed on the move, strolling around in collaboration with thirty members of the public. The group plays while carrying out various actions, and so finally constructs an artistic sound installation. The thirty tubes are hung on thirty ropes and counter-weighted so as to create a landscape of hanging metal that the audience can play and move around.

“Our bodies are not isolated from the world.
As part of it, we are always talking in an exterior world that affects us and reflects our inner world. Taking this as our starting point, we will look into the experience of staying in outdoor spaces, listening to people and places like a body taking notes. Through this practice, we discover that movement outwards from within is not specifically to do with the ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the body, but rather a perpetual harmonisation of the encounter with all the forms of life around us.
What we are callng PréPostMundo is a desire to share this encounter through the creation of a dance show, both in the public sphere and in the theatre, taking care to fine tune our presence on stage in keeping with the questions that transpire from the work of inhabiting the public sphere.

Mal Pelo offers a workshop in which to try out the mechanisms of action and what they may unleash. A look at movement and writing with the body in action. Precision, duration, commitment, intensity, silence, absence, presence, punctuation, habitability, surrender, phrasing, punctuation, linearity, temporality, musicality, rhythm, writing - these are some of the terms that we shall be questioning during this course.

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Mal Pelo offers a workshop in which to try out the mechanisms of action and what they may unleash. A look at movement and writing with the body in action. Precision, duration, commitment, intensity, silence, absence, presence, punctuation, habitability, surrender, phrasing, punctuation, linearity, temporality, musicality, rhythm, writing - these are some of the terms that we shall be questioning during this course.

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This laboratory revolves around the model for a dancer that I have developed over my more than fifty years as a dancer and choreographer.
It centres around these questions: how to interpret a piece of choreography in a personal way? Whether your own work or someone else’s, in an improvisation context or more formal, so as to serve the needs of the choreography and so that, as performers, we feel it as our own, identify with it.
How to execute it? Indirectly, we shall deal with choreography, improvisation technique or other questions in relation to our profession.

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Cyberexorcism is a continuation of two previous works; Likes and Spiritual Boyfriends. The relationship between body-image-power-digitality has been one of the most present axes in these latest works. This time, it is a group piece in collaboration with five performers/Tik Tokers, which takes the Tik Tok app as its research base and aims to displace and/or exorcise the mechanisms and choreographic tools from the Internet to the stage.

What are we doing with these lives that we don’t want?
What do you have to concede to the world, in this sick world?

The idea comes from the conflict generated when two realities meet, clash, coincide in the same place from different points of view. A body’s impetus adapts to situations it cannot understand. It’s as if reason were escaping reason.

Who has the power to change their way of seeing things? Is there a certain difficulty in perceiving another truth with empathy? The perception of a reality should not come into question. So, how do we relate to each other?

Burnt [the eternal long now] is a performance piece created by LEEVAKULYA.
Burnt takes a close look at the dynamic relationship between union and exhaustion through burnt-out syndrome. According to the Dutch sociologist Fred L. Polak in his book The Image of the Future (1961), “Every man leads a double life.” For Polak, this dualism was the indispensible requirement for the movement of the events in time and the dynamics of historical change.

CONDENS will be a salon piece, a dance solo with set and visuals.

A new investigation of movement, in which Magí hopes to research relationships of form, dynamics and rhythm between the human body and matter. Spaces of vibration between the mineral or vegetable and flesh and blood. A dialogue between kinds of movement, textures, lines and beats, far from the urgency or fragility of the present world.

After his previous pieces, the street duet COSSOC and the project Brotes Transhumantes, in which he worked outside on slowly developed, detailed and sensitive projects, he now takes the opposite tack: bringing the reality and spontaneity of the outdoors into the theatre.

Third part about female communities and their practices after IMAGO-GO (2018, about the figure of the cheerleader) and GUÉRILLÈRES (2021, about the guerrilla weman), ROLL (2024/25) is dedicated to the practice of roller skating. Not so much through the sensual and consensual disco or roller dance as through the prism of roller derby, a contact sport and current focus of political struggles. The choreographic confrontation of these sequined warriors will be inspired by battles of all styles, but also by various hypnotic, spiritual dances or dances from the contemporary repertoire, which the skates will allow us to amplify and accentuate, even the experience of altered states of consciousness.

During the residency at L'animal I will investigate basically in the choreographic aspect of this piece and the choreographies in circles and the languages ??that I would use for the body.

ACTIVITY POSTPONED AT THE REQUEST OF THE COMPANY

Mascarade, inspired by the rituals found in ancestral interactions, but also in the daily lives of those who practise them. These are always changing and are unique because they are linked to specific social contexts and are collectively identified with particular symbols.
The photographs of Charles Fréger in his book Wilder Mann moved me with their extreme beauty, but above all because of what they tell us about our lives today. Other work on masks and carnivals, in particular La Maske by Phyllis Galembo, made me ask myself what these ancient and contemporary rituals mean. Do we still need to celebrate the change of the seasons, rites of passage, initiations and so forth? With the inevitable standardisation of the world, will they simply turn into folklore for tourists, or will we find the way to resist and reinvent them?

WE OPEN DOORS AT 20:15 - BAR SERVICE - DANCE JAM - PLASTIC VISUAL EXHIBITIONS

L’Arreplegada is an event set up by the group La Verema, in collaboration with L’animal a l’esquena.

An arts event with the aim of offering a space for young artists from the local area to share their work. It is a gathering to encourage creative communication between the participants, who come from a variety of disciplines and creative fields, helping them to set up close-knit networks.

Desierto is based on the piece Timber by the US composer Michael Gordon. It will combine dance with an innovative sound design. The idea is to reinterpret the musical piece through a unique immersive experience.
The show, designed for six musicians and three dancers, aims to emphasise the austerity and physicality of the sound content and communicate it to the audience. It will consist of dance close up to the spectators, with sound amplification that focusses attention on the subtle and delicate shifts of the music of Michael Gordon, placing the audience at the centre of the sound.
One singular feature of the project will be the arrangement in concentric circles of audience, dancers and musicians. The musicians will be at the centre of the piece, as the visual axis and backing curtain for the dance.

What if the theatre were a space between heaven and earth, between the past and the future? What would happen if this place were filled, in turn, by memories of when we humans were not yet cut off from nature and the current prophesies of the end of the world?
In R.A.V.E, Cecilia Colacrai is alone on stage, trying to investigate, through movement, our instict for preservation. Using an intense relationship with the vibration of sound, she evokes the primitive to display a range of physical states. With extraordinary plasticity and capacity for resistence, she transforms herself over and over again, taking her body to the limit to make us imagine new beginnings.
In this undefined space, Cecilia does not speak for herself, but through her body, about the finite nature and the future of our species. Here, dance is presented as a trigger for fiction, offering a language that allows us to imagine ways of life beyond the walls of the theatre.
Joao Lima

Eu - yo (en portugués)
Eu - bueno, bien (prefijo griego)
Euteria - Sentimiento bueno y positivo de unidad con la Terra

“Eu” habla de la conexión con la tierra que nos ha visto nacer; nuestra tierra, la tierra de todas, la de nuestras abuelas. Es un laberinto performático, una experiencia multidisciplinar donde las diferentes formas de expresión a través del cuerpo, de la escultura, de la música y de la imagen proyectada conviven y se retroalimentan. Una experiencia donde la danza se funde, se confunde y convive con la escultura y la música para reflexionar sobre el renacer constante, el vivir y morir, el Yo individuo, el Yo universal y la Naturaleza.

A seminar in which to reflect on the activities and identity of L’animal a l’esquena as a space for creation and ideas. We are inviting Idoia Zabaleta and Juan Cruz from Azala-Espacio de Creación, Vitoria, to set up a forum in which to evaluate the careers and experience of both centres, in order to plan possible futures around the potential and specifics of L’animal as a creation centre and collaborative space, with special emphasis on its particular contribution to the local area.
On Saturday 18th June we will hold an open day for members of the public and colleagues from other creation centres, such as Mariantònia Oliver, EIMA Creación (Mallorca) and Eric Deniaud from the Hammana Artist House (Lebanon), as well as artists closely linked to L’animal a l’esquena such as Meritxell Colell, Xavi Bobés, Leo Castro and Federica Porello.

Los informalls are addicted to risk, to taking the difficult path, throwing themselves into the abyss of facing up to everything beyond their control and all life’s struggles, breaking out of their comfort zone and treading the very limit of their capabilities. The aim of their new piece is to return to play and exploration of the ridiculous as research methods. This time their starting point is the hypothetical creation of a musical album … only fate will decide how this all ends. A possible premier in 2023, at the very least!

MORTA SPLENDOR is a research and performance creation project that aims to explore our consciousness of death, questioning death itself as well as our spiritual and social relationship with it. The idea is to bring in different ways of looking at death: the death of the theatre, the death of values, of relationships, of eras. Could the end be a new beginning? Bárbara Sánchez, in this new creation process, intends to explore a collection of existential metaphors through which to draw closer to the consciousness of the public. She traces a broad arc, from the precariousness of her own life as an artist to the supposed death of western societies.

MORTA SPLENDOR is also an act of liberation and an exaltation of life. As Octavio Paz said, “Our cult of death is a cult of life”. For this, Bárbara Sánchez’s alter ego will appear in many forms throughout the piece: as a mistress of ceremonies, a painter of vanities, a “finisher-off” (or mid-wife of death), or a mourner.

The project Desbordes/Excesses looks into the human need for evasion and the creation of alternative identities as a means of escape from everyday limits and the emptiness of the human condition. Through excess, artificiality and indulgence, its characters come up against a reality that they cannot contain, in a constant search for fantasy and unreality. The project investigates the concepts of overflow and containment in relation to the aesthetics of performance, corporality and choreographic language. The limits of harmony, restraint and appropriateness are questioned, aiming for a physical and aesthetic effusion in times of containment and austerity.

Territorio Mutado is a site-specific project that operates in stages. It uses the existing situation as a framework of possibilities to risk a singular format, content and relationships. It exists at the converngence between flows of movement, bodies of different kinds and the surroundings; it observes the movement where we have paused.
Urban environments are built over water basins that run beneath the land or asphalt. These basins are usually administered according to engineering criteria that do take into account biological adaptability and this is how the collective imagination begins to work around water.
Water is changeable, hard to grasp and dilutes everything, characteristics that get in the way of the intended sense of progress. It happens that these are also characteristics of dance. At the same time, if we broaden our focus of observation, we see that every basin is linked in a huge network of larger basins, and is thus a great connector of the territory.

Territorio Mutado observes how an environment opens up a culture and how the culture opens up the environment in a symbiotic relationship in which directions dissolve away and a complex network of relationships is established.
In its first stage, it travelled along 170km stretches of the Matanza Riachuelo and Río Salat basin in Argentina, as well as the Guaies basin in Ecuador, crossing mega-metropolises, cities, conurbations, towns, countryside and little local viallages. At this stage the project had the support of many national and international institutions.
At present it is at work on the Arroyo Vega, the only basin that begins and ends within the jurisdiction of the city of Buenos Aires. This stage is backed by the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires.

What if the theatre were a space between heaven and earth, between the past and the future? What would happen if this place were filled, in turn, by memories of when we humans were not yet cut off from nature and the current prophesies of the end of the world?
In R.A.V.E, Cecilia Colacrai is alone on stage, trying to investigate, through movement, our instict for preservation. Using an intense relationship with the vibration of sound, she evokes the primitive to dis-play a range of physical states. With extraordinary plasticity and capacity for resistence, she transforms herself over and over again, taking her body to the limit to make us imagine new beginnings.
In this undefined space, Cecilia does not speak for herself, but through her body, about the finite nature and the future of our species. Here, dance is presented as a trigger for fiction, offering a language that allows us to imagine ways of life beyond the walls of the theatre.

Joao Lima

By tuning into certain textures of movement we can take apart the patterns of tension that form the fulcrum around which bodies flow. Investigating the textures - and recording the sounds - of the interior of a body in motion in a technological space, a semi-anechoic chamber: frictions, steps, spasms, clicks, tinnitus, blows, air currents and so many other phenomena emitted by the body in motion. Through the formal process of recording in the chamber, we create a soundscape. A study of the relationships between textures of vibration and their anatomical correlations as a procedure to construct the choreography and state of the body. An exercise in kinesthetic attunement. We have to think of our flesh.

At the seashore, the movement of the tides highlights the way life gives and takes without explanation or mooring. In Platea, everything vanishes before our eyes at times, as if it were an illusion, and then appears again. We make out the fall, the echoes. At the centre, which is firmer, a table is laid for a banquet and a dish shimmers, presiding over it all like a master of ceremonies. Whoever comes and goes, faint and disorientated, like a ship-wreck survivor or a mermaid, once had a life and a death, and his or her body still wavers between these. They seem like witnesses of the remains of some debauchery but their dazzling teeth still lie in wait.

Platea is a piece of theatre that has grown from the unique imagination of Tripak. It is the vision of a fantastical world in which images and gestures emerge from the unconscious before being turned into a discourse in this shared creative space, using archetypes and basic actions and emotions. The work is based on symbolic, dreamlike material but this is far from stereotypical, using the evocative, renovating power of absurd humour, and valuing the strange, or even extraordinary.

Infinity is Julia and Rudi's first dance theatre meditation in which they guide the audience through a mystical journey. The outside world of the magical dance on stage will merge with your internal awareness. The premise is movement and consciousness, becoming aware of the infinite power that flows to and through us, giving life to all beings.
This is the first production where they explicitly bring together their shamanic powers to fuse with their signature choreographic movement language.

This is the first production where they explicitly bring together their shamanic powers to fuse with their signature choreographic movement language.
Throughout the years of Julia and Rudi’s worldwide ventures into meditation, energetic channelling, yoga, plant medicine and personal development they tapped into their internal power and felt called to share a work of art that aligns with their mission to raise human consciousness. During their creative career, they strived for a link that bridged their artistic expression with their spiritual path. ? is the culmination of their personal holistic approach, sculpturing a new way to experience a dance production, in which the theatre setting becomes a sacred space conducive for internal realisations. ? opens a door through which the audience is invited to tap into the infinity we all contain within.

During this Dance Theatre Meditation, you will be receiving energetic transmissions both through words and movement, channeled by Julia and Rudi and embodied by the stunningly fluid dancers. The cosmic tribe on stage was formed through an intensive time in the dance studio as well as sacred rituals in Nature, connecting beyond the physical realm. All group sessions started with a gratitude practice, tapping into the power of our open hearts. ?

The whole research and final production was, is and will continue to unfold as a sacred ritual of movement, light and sound, reminding us of the cosmic dance we are all a part of and the infinite potential of our future becoming.
We invite you to enter into the spirit of Infinity.

As an artistic form, choreography is notable for combining rigorous physical and mental training with the highest standards of creativity. Dance is, however, also the most ephemeral of all the arts, and this extraordinary creativity emanating from the body tends to vanish without any significant trace. This piece focusses on how the creativity that radiates from the experience of the body can be captured and form the basis for artistic creation in other disciplines.

Embodied Machine is based on an experiment with translating the human body into abstractions that can serve as foundations to be transformed into other aesthetic manifestations. Is it possible to synthesize light and sound based on our movement and interact with these presences as if they were fellow dancers? Is it possible to look deeper into our knowledge of creativity associated with the body (embodied creativity) through forms of artificial intelligence? These are some of the questions that Embodied Machine attempts to answer. Muriel Romero relates on stage in this piece with avatars of herself manifested in the form of light and sound, presences that behave autonomously and with which it is possible to interact in a multi-sensory dialogue.

From the Greek pan (all) and horama (view), the word panorama was popularised by the Irish painter Robert Baker (1787) to describe his circular paintings. In his wide landscapes the artist created an immersive experience that invited contemplation, and so reflection. What is our place in this landscape?
In the same way, Raquel Gualtero asks us to enter a contemplative state in which, through her body, we travel through different imaginings that seem strangely familiar to us. The whole piece is freighted with recognisable gestures that, through repetition, become infinite choreographies. The dancer’s body is at the centre of this landscape. Fitted with a second skin that conjures post-human futures, this body invites you to enter a trance as the only way to reach an intimate, unique and untransferable place, that is not a photocopy of anything or anyone. A place pierced by a voice that belongs to us and which transforms the moulds we have made for ourselves. This place in the landscape may perhaps be strange, inhospitable and unexpected, but it is certainly one we long for.

ous, la forêt - ou comment se planter is the first piece by the company Kif Kif, made up of Baptiste and Lucas Bouissou, two young artists and performers who work in the language of the circus, clowning and movement, accompanied in this first joint project by the musician Alexis Barbier.

A tree/the path to follow
A musician?/the gardener? God? Or mother?
Two almost identical men/two children
An apple/the gravity of the situation

At the foot of the tree, he finds his place. These two grown up boys compare themselves to each other, twirl, bump into each other, hold each other up and eat the apple. With juggling and poetic-metaphysical questioning, these naive explorers experiment with the laws of gravity. They reclaim the right to sink upwards, to turn their upper and lower parts and progress in life. To the beat of drums, falls and suspensions, they spread their branches and their imagination with lighthearted humour and tenderness.

Bachelardiana - un duermevelas is a choreo-chronical study of darkness and cracks in faith. A study because it takes place in a studio. A study because it should recall the shadows around the contemplative saints in their studies. A study because “studium” in Latin means the patience of desire and the desire for patience. Inspired by the inner movements of confession, it calls up a darkness and revelation that allow the music of Bach to think about itself.

“Before the Words: Temporary Shelter”, is an open and shared reflection with the Mal Pelo collective. For the third time in its career of over 30 years, Mal Pelo has articulated a de-located staging that accentuates and pushes the concept of “exhibition”, expanding their invitation to the bodies of those visiting the museum galleries. Isn’t the greatest exhibition the one that encompasses bodies? Aren’t we always being exposed to something?
This exhibition is the result of a working process carried out over various phases. The first was done in the Mal Pelo creation space, called L’animal a l’esquena [Animal on Your Back], while the second took place in the museum. In fact, ways of understanding the institution itself have also been driven to the limit, thinking of ways to inhabit and conceive it from the perspective of creation.
The project’s potentiality lies in the visualisation of bodies in exhibition, absolute, free and wild; here, exhibition is taken in the most radical, poetic and violent sense of the word. In this way, the show becomes a receiving place, a shelter, run through by parallel universes that temporarily live somewhere else. A shelter opening up to dynamics that tend to infuse other spaces, a receptor of personal memories arising from close contact.

A danced and spoken Monologue

NOWHEN is the name of a character, immersed in his present, who reveals her multifaceted relationship with her real and imaginary environment.

A space full of things, thoughts and actions, sounds and silences, light and darkness, where everything folds and unfolds, materially or metaphorically, kindly or violently.

This performance gives value to the time of reflection, and to the search for a path, a subtle and empty line between gravity and lightness.

POSTPONED ACTIVITY

RESERVATION IT'S REQUIERED: https://www.eventbrite.es/e/entradas-larreplegada-215282755517

Arreplegada es un evento creado por el grup La Verema con la colaboración de L’animal a l’esquena.

Acto cultural con el objetivo de ofrecer un espacio para compartir y conocer el trabajo de jóvenes artistas del territorio. Es un encuentro para fomentar el intercambio creativo de las participantes, que pertenecen a disciplinas y ramas de creación diversas, favoreciendo así a la creación de una red artística de proximidad.

El aspecto sensorial de las cosas is an investigation into the pairing of fragmentation and coordination, applied to thought, movement and the other “things” that make up the identity of a performance piece. It is a project fuelled by a desire to share, in the journey towards the creation of a solo, in interviews and workshops, the questions that arise in the theoretical and physical landscapes that are traversed in the writing of a piece of work.

Los Informalls are addicted to risk, to taking the difficult path, throwing themselves into the abyss of facing up to everything beyond their control and all life’s struggles, breaking out of their comfort zone and treading the very limit of their capabilities. The aim of their new piece is to return to play and exploration of the ridiculous as research methods. This time their starting point is the hypothetical creation of a musical album … only fate will decide how this all ends. A possible premier in 2023, at the very least!

V7 és un projecte teatral d’investigació sobre la por i sobre llibertat d’expressió, el processos de validació que les peces artístiques han de passar i com aquests processos institucionalitzats i burocratitzats poden arribar a afectar a la creació i l’evolució dels projectes artístics.
El punt de partida d’aquest projecte és el documental Breathe dirigit i produït per Susanna Barranco, amb el suport de TV3, i que es va estrenar a la Seminci de Valladolid l’octubre de 2021. Les protagonistes d’aquest documental són les dones internes del centre de justícia Brians i la relació personal entre elles, sent el seu objectiu mostrar la realitat que viuen les preses al centre penitenciari i donar veu a aquestes dones a partir, sobretot, de l'expressió teatral.

Mertitxell Colell torna a L’animal ara per a iniciar un nou projecte cinematogràfic en col·laboració amb Angélica Castelló.
Després d'un any i mig de correspondència virtual, es trobaran a L’animal per a poder concretar el treball sonor i treballar juntes en el guió del film. En aquest cas, es tracta d'un nou viatge, ara amb l'Angélica, mexicana de naixement, resident a Viena, qui duu a terme el projecte de realitzar un khipus sonor (una espècie de mapa teixit amb cintes magnètiques) pels marges dels Andes peruans, realitzant a la vegada un cens de la població i escrivint, a través de nusos, tota la informació sobre els habitants de la zona. A mesura que avança el viatge, l'Angélica anirà reconnectant -en somnis- amb el Mèxic que va deixar de petita (les històries i llegendes i la casa familiar).

En el nombre de Bach/In the Name of Bach is the new proposal for a performance piece by María Magdalena Garzón, following the line of research begun three years ago exploring the relationship between music and dance in performance.

While the story of the relationship between these two art forms makes us think deeply about the main artistic movements, their manifestations, aesthetics and procedures, this project, at least for now, does not claim to be a work of history or research into baroque music and dance. Bringing the two languages together, however, is an attempt to recover the essence of the gestures, in sound and body, of a shared grammar, without filters or conventional baggage. Working on music written earlier, whether or not it was composed for dance, provides a concrete, well-defined framework to work within, while also offering a broad range of possibilities and strategies for composition. In this way, in short, Bach’s work gives us a forest full of symbols, a whole continent of the unforeseen. Its vast complexity and semantic ramifications lead us to unpick the poetry of a process of craftsmanship, to work on references from our cultural heritage, and put our emphasis on the minute detail of the manipulation of the material as an element in composition. En el nombre de Bach is thus based on a desire to give due value to music that has already been written, is already made.

Clumsiness has been the main incentive to weave, thread and embroider a piece that hopes to capture and create a cosy, kindly atmosphere with whoever you watch it with. Being clumsy stays with us all our lives, to a greater or lesser extent, though it’s only in childhood that it is allowed, the stage when falling down and making mistakes is an innate part of learning and discovery. My intention is to reverse its meaning and praise it, to squeeze all the juice out of it and make something jolly, naive and sensitive, treating it with a radical simplicity that includes each and every one of the stages and experiences of our lives: growing up, but also falling in love or losing physical and mental faculties.
JAPAN aims to be a story that travels and shows us a catalogue of some extremely clumsy bodies. It is an over the top love letter, passionate, fantastical and innocent.

Los Informalls are addicted to risk, to taking the difficult path, throwing themselves into the abyss of facing up to everything beyond their control and all life’s struggles, breaking out of their comfort zone and treading the very limit of their capabilities. The aim of their new piece is to return to play and exploration of the ridiculous as research methods. This time their starting point is the hypothetical creation of a musical album … only fate will decide how this all ends. A possible premier in 2023, at the very least!

V7 és un projecte teatral d’investigació sobre la por i sobre llibertat d’expressió, el processos de validació que les peces artístiques han de passar i com aquests processos institucionalitzats i burocratitzats poden arribar a afectar a la creació i l’evolució dels projectes artístics.
El punt de partida d’aquest projecte és el documental Breathe dirigit i produït per Susanna Barranco, amb el suport de TV3, i que es va estrenar a la Seminci de Valladolid l’octubre de 2021. Les protagonistes d’aquest documental són les dones internes del centre de justícia Brians i la relació personal entre elles, sent el seu objectiu mostrar la realitat que viuen les preses al centre penitenciari i donar veu a aquestes dones a partir, sobretot, de l'expressió teatral.

Contrary to a negative opinion of modern adolescents that is far too widespread, the opposite of a clinical documentary on the young, we offer a group of teenagers the chance to give shape to images they themselves have dreamt up. YOLO, in urban slang, stands for the English acronym “You Only Live Once”.

Narration, the physical and mental body, resonance or the voices that become words, speech and words, none of these ever manifest themselves completely or directly in an accessible way. You have to seek them out with intuition, lucid effort, determined to invent an expression of the self.
An affirmation of character that breaks free of the absolutes of reality, designing motifs that are never detected or organised according to the hierarchy of efficiency and the superiority of movement and synthesis. These are diagrams, impressions in style and structure, in shapes, in a range of recorded narratives.

El aspecto sensorial de las cosas is an investigation into the pairing of fragmentation and coordination, applied to thought, movement and the other “things” that make up the identity of a performance piece. It is a project fuelled by a desire to share, in the journey towards the creation of a solo, in interviews and workshops, the questions that arise in the theoretical and physical landscapes that are traversed in the writing of a piece of work.

For the thirtieth anniversary of the Compañía Mariantònia Oliver, the artist has decided to “revisit” some of the pieces that have been significant in her career, bring them back to life and interpret them with all her accumulated experience and a fresh perspective.

La Continua is based on the concept of fragmentation as a basis for experiment and choreographic composition, in the creation of a situation of tense intimacy with the audience and by active, improvised involvement of spectators in the performance.

The stage is structured around a sofa. The idea is arbitrarily to invite spectators to sit on it and take an active part in the construction of our dramatic plot. This will entail a flow of improvisation, freshness and spontaneity and exposes us to risk and error. It will keep us on our toes and modify the lines of composition, like an open game in which no sooner do rules expire, new ones are invented.

POSTPONED RESIDENCE

FIGURAS DEL UMBRAL is based on the reflections of a body in the age of acceleration. We live in times of lives in flight, caught in the inertia of everyday life and rhythms determined by the demands of production and efficiency, which constantly postpone desire and scatter and fragment our attention. These accelerated bodies are full of pent up speed, inorganic ways of doing things and tacit behaviours, and lack repertoire. In these crazy times, Pasolini’s slogan becomes more relevant than ever: “throw your body into battle”, throw your body into dance, alert to a moderate, observant vibe, ready to open up to create new movements, new gestures to break with the hegemony of the myth that technology is neutral, for it depends on cultural norms.

Mal Pelo offers a workshop in which to try out the mechanisms of action and where they may lead. A look at movement and writing for the body in action. Precision, endurance, commitment, intensity, silence, absence, presence, punctuation, habitability, surrender, phrasing, linearity, temporality, musicality, rhythm, and writing are some of the terms we shall be investigating during this course.
To activate: 1. To put an action into effect 2. To make movements and gestures to make something understood 3. To control the action of a mechanism.
Mal Pelo’s workshops are given by the two co-directors of the company, though both may not be present at every session.

detalls

“Are you Sarah Connor?”

The flutter of seconds that separates the question from the answer is enough to allow the exterminator literally to put his foot in the door, press the trigger and fire at point blank range, without knowing if this is, or not in fact the person he was looking for. In that instant he exterminates any imminent or immediate future for that person.

Mal Pelo offers a workshop in which to try out the mechanisms of action and where they may lead. A look at movement and writing for the body in action. Precision, endurance, commitment, intensity, silence, absence, presence, punctuation, habitability, surrender, phrasing, linearity, temporality, musicality, rhythm, and writing are some of the terms we shall be investigating during this course.
To activate: 1. To put an action into effect 2. To make movements and gestures to make something understood 3. To control the action of a mechanism.
Mal Pelo’s workshops are given by the two co-directors of the company, though both may not be present at every session.

detalls

FREE PERFORMANCE WITH LIMITED CAPACITY DUE TO COVID MEASURES. RESERVATION REQUIRED, MAXIMUM 20 PEOPLE

Impromptu is the name of a project by Michèle Benz and Gaia Magrané, a Swiss-Spanish artistic duo. This residency comes in the early days of the project, which began just over a year ago. In it they will be exercising and developing their aptitudes and capacity for instant, spontaneous creation, with the listening skills needed to construct something interesting alongside everything that surrounds us in the here and now (objects, sound, audience, music, bodies …), to be played around with at their whim.

The starting point is to explore the spectrum of representations of the Devil in different cultures, with the aim of finding some underlying connection. This cross-cultural record makes us consider, firstly, our own frame of reference, rescuing the figures that have been regarded as “diabolical” since pre-hispanic times, from the devils in nativity plays to the dark western demons of the middle ages, from the profound shamanism of indigenous cultures to the vulgar satanism of teenage games, the chilling obscurantism of the Judeo-Christian devil to the colourful demons of folk dance.

For this new choreographic project, Marta Izquierdo will invite two men to take on the mythological figures of titans or twins. This is an encounter between two dancers, Pepe Serrano and Kouadio Ebenezer, working on mythological figures. Firstly we have the Titans, archaic figures of Greek mythology who lived on Olympus before they were chased out by Zeus and his divine sons. Then we have the heroic and tragic figures of the inseparable twins Castor and Pollux.
Pepe Serrano lives in Madrid, Kouadio Ebenezer (“Ebony”) in Toulouse. They share an imposing height, youth (aged 18 and 23), and appear as two living sculptures, two brother Titans separated not by Mount Olympus, but by the Pyrenees.
These giants, far from having a monolithic virility, are androgynous. As usual in the choreographic projects of Marta Izquierdo, there is a distance between the figure and the performer who embodies him or her.
Pepe is currently working as a drag artist in the discos of Madrid, combining this activity with his work as an actor-performer and as a plastic artist.
Ebenezer is a dancer. He has been a classical dancer but is chiefly known for Voguing, though open to other choreographic languages.

El aspecto sensorial de las cosas is an investigation into the pairing of fragmentation and coordination, applied to thought, movement and the other “things” that make up the identity of a performance piece. It is a project fuelled by a desire to share, in the journey towards the creation of a solo, in interviews and workshops, the questions that arise in the theoretical and physical landscapes that are traversed in the writing of a piece of work.

PAPILLON questions the contemporary concept of individual liberty in a society that is ever more dependent. This proposal exposes the collision between impulse and reason; false freedom and real freedom. The identity and singularity of the individual is questioned, with the pretext of presenting the performer in a fictitious luminous cocoon, clearly inspired by a modern Platonic cave.
By understanding anxiety as a vertigo induced by freedom and the inability to take control, the piece presents us with a human being reduced to little more than a sleepwalking robot, a kind of insect-eating puppet, like a butterfly trapped in the light.
The set is surrounded by a light installation around the performer like a cage. The beauty and light of this do not let us see beyond, hiding whatever is in the darkness. Limits and liberty co-exist in the reality of the individual, just as darkness and light are part of the reality of mankind.
The aim of this residency is to finish/conclude the piece before its first performance at the Fira Tàrrega, so the whole team, or most of us, need to meet to fine-tune all the information and every aspect of the piece.

Panorámica is a collective research and creation project in dance that promotes the use of imagination on stage as a tool to stimulate reflection, experiment and discussion.

The project brings together various collaborators from different artistic fields and is based on the search for an empty space to act as a canvass, so as later to construct landscapes and architecture that provide an alternative to the current reality. From the body, movement, music, audiovisual material and writing, it will generate layers to define places for invention.

I am especially attracted to the idea of approaching EMPTINESS as a way of confronting the excess of information we now have and the power of manipulation this exercises without our hardly noticing. I also like the concept of the LINE as a basic element that is present in all artistic fields, as well as its use to create complicities and the possibility of a break with power.

FREE PERFORMANCE WITH LIMITED CAPACITY DUE TO COVID MEASURES. RESERVATION REQUIRED, MAXIMUM 20 PEOPLE

Farrés Brothers resume a project which they tried to complete three years ago. It’s a visual piece of theatre of objects, with live music, about the need for protection. When they first began to discuss it, around 2018, no one could have imagined that at a moment’s notice we would find ourselves shut away at home to keep ourselves safe from an invisible threat…
This project is driven by three things:
Jordi Palet and Toni Ubach’s desire to work together
A shared grief
and
Two laboratories with Xavier Bobés and one with Pablo Messiez at the Festival IF and in the workshop of the Sala Beckett.

With MURMUT they hope to achieve three objectives:
To combine our creative worlds, that of objects and that of music, in a performance.
To discuss the need to feel safe, contrasted with the constant sense of insecurity
and
3. To do this using objects and sound as a means of theatrical expression, with words as further material.

A project by Amalia Fernández accompanied by Monica Muntaner and Catherine Sardella. Neti Neti is a Hindu concept meaning something like “neither this nor that”. It is a method for growing closer to the comprehension of the divine, the absolute, the origin of existence, or whatever you care to call it. This understanding not only cannot be reached by intellectual means, but demands that you should avoid logical reasoning if it is to be achieved.

Every piece of work I do begins (or continues) with the desire to work on something latent that is pushing to come out. The process is set up with a group of people in a very intuitive way, trying out many things that sometimes don’t seem to come to anything, big ideas appearing and falling away, crises following upon discoveries, until the material is there. At a certain moment, decisions are made that mould the work, we mourn what is to be left out and celebrate what remains (this is the moment when the work itself takes its own decisions and responds to its own needs, becoming somehow independent from us). When the piece is first performed the public arrive, and colleagues, and the conversation begins and we begin to understand what we have made, this living thing. The “new” creation that I want to make comes from certain concerns that still remain from my previous pieces: En la sombra de un elefante (In the Shade of an Elephant) and Retrato de un monstruo (Portrait of a Monster).

Holding this residency at L'animal a l’esquena offers the opportunity to revisit a space I am fond of, full of care and motivation which invites one to go deeper into the complexities of our practice. The project emerged from the dialogue between our desires and the special circumstances our communities are living through at the moment. Within the framework of the project I have been working on for several years, Insurrección del sensible (Insurrection of the Sensitive), I propose, in collaboration with Idoia Zabaleta, to investigate and create experiences that promote plural, porous, dynamic, diverse and shared bodies.

Whether in Spain or abroad, there are hardly any venues or publications dedicated exclusively to film curation. One research project by the curator and editor Garbiñe Ortega is precisely to create spaces for reflection, the exchange of ideas and education about the practice of curation in different spaces and formats.

OPEN REHEARSAL WITH LIMITED CAPACITY UNDER RESERVATION BY COVID MEASURES, MAXIMUM 20 PEOPLE

R.A.V.E. (Revolutionary Group for Voluntary Extermination)
“The absence of a future has already begun. The that has finished arrived, yet again, which suggests that perhaps it has never ceased beginning…” (from the book “Is There A World To Come” by Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro).

Starting from the idea of the finite, limit and end, an instantaneous device for composition is put into play in the form of a solo.
The future, the idea of the cycle, of returning to the known, coming back, implacable time, permanence versus change, the indefinite, the foreseeable, endurance and incessant transformation, are some of the starting points for the construction of this piece which, inevitably, in broaching hypotheses on the future must also deal with beginnings.

OPEN REHEARSAL WITH LIMITED CAPACITY UNDER RESERVATION ON JULY 7 AT THE CANAL PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, SALT, GIRONA

At a certain point in my career I understood that when it came down to it, my work was to give light and value to things which appear not to have either, and vice versa. This is the most important function of the artist, since he must be able to lift himself out of inertia, blindspots and conventions, to stand back and, with a bit of luck, enderezer something in his life and, to an extent, in society itself. In other words, being able to change our view is the only thing we should aspire to in order to face the dark corners of the psyche and the insondables mechanisms that groups of humans drag around with them.

It is with this aim in sight that the manipulator of objects works, looking and looking again at the material, passing it from one hand to another, investigating it on every scale to find new and unexpected uses that will reveal the profound nature that makes it what it is, and above all everything that it could be, since the object is always a projection of ourselves.

So much so that the main subject of this project is myself, the purported artist, a crude metaphor for the individual. Perhaps the act of making art is in fact by definition a sacrifice. Every song, every show, may involve throwing something of supposed value on the fire. The manipulator of objects works to visualise shadow and does in fact make it flesh. The manipulator of objects accompanies the artist into the abyss: the abyss of loss of identity, loss of image, loss of reason and loss of courage. Maybe he is the one who needs the opulent, blind and arrogant concept and way of life that we have as a society.

So the musical artist and his shadow on stage will perform a kind of naked ritual full of songs, sounds, dreams and symbols, spoken words, vomited texts, confessions, darkness, epiphanies, dances, catharsis and tiny gestures that contain the subtle fight to the death between necessary, deceitful meaning and nothingness.
Enric Montefusco

OPEN REHEARSAL WITH LIMITED CAPACITY UNDER RESERVATION BY COVID MEASURES, MAXIMUM 20 PEOPLE

Inspired by rural landscape and manual work, the piece De una en otra (From One Into Another) combines dance, visual and object theatre. Through the manipulation of thirty seven tiles, three performers draw visual and sound landscapes with a movement marked by physical labour and constant effort.
De una a otra tries to transform and transcend the fragility and weight of the tiles into an emblem of equilibrium and of human relations submitting to matter. It favours materials and sounds that are harsh, delicate but forceful, vulnerable to irreversible breakage.
The piece seeks shadows and corners of the city: patios, patches of wasteland, areas under reconstruction.

Mal Pelo offers a workshop in which to try out the mechanisms of action and where they may lead. A look at movement and writing for the body in action. Precision, endurance, commitment, intensity, silence, absence, presence, punctuation, habitability, surrender, phrasing, linearity, temporality, musicality, rhythm, and writing are some of the terms we shall be investigating during this course.
To activate: 1. To put an action into effect 2. To make movements and gestures to make something understood 3. To control the action of a mechanism.
Mal Pelo’s workshops are given by the two co-directors of the company, though both may not be present at every session.

detalls

OPEN REHEARSAL WITH LIMITED CAPACITY UNDER RESERVATION BY COVID MEASURES, MAXIMUM 20 PEOPLE

Abrazo (Embrace) is the next project coming up for MAR-MAR, directed by Nerea Martínez, with Natalia García Muro and the designer Mónica Lavandera.
We’re talking about bodies in a state of stillness, image, infinite vision, a time for contemplation, silence appreciated in all its 360º. We’re looking at what would happen if we were to work with the idea of feeling that we were sculptures, matter. If we think of the body made of clay: how would it move? The idea of stillness, a slow time, an image changing imperceptibly so that, almost without realising, you are seeing a different sculpture, a different embrace, another action. It’s as if it were a photogram.

“This civilization is over. And everyone knows it”, says McKenzie Wark.
Matrioshka was first born with all her identical bodies inevitably splitting off to feed the great machine. Now we have reached the last body, and matrioshka has become a myth of liminality and vertigo.

The artist Catalina Julve will have several sessions working on her new project Epistolario Manila/Manila Epistles.

Losinformalls are addicted to risk, to taking the difficult path, throwing themselves into the abyss of facing up to everything beyond their control and all life’s struggles, breaking out of their comfort zone and treading the very limit of their capabilities.

This project is the first artistic collaboration between Quim Girón (contemporary circus artist) and Moon Ribas (cyborg choreographer), in which they research how to bring natural phenomena to the stage. Fenómeno (Phenomenon) is a duet in conversation with temperature and ice, the main element they use to model different universes. There is constant transformation during the piece, of space, bodies and matter.
From a fridge on wheels comes ice that will pass through all its states: solid, liquid and gas. Fenómeno invites the audience to a space that is intimate, fresh and poetic.
Phenomena open the door to mystery, the unknown of how science works, the uncontrollable force of nature, but they can also go beyond magnitude. Each of us is a small phenomenon and we can even feel phenomenal. The piece Fenómeno invites the audience to a cosy space, but not necessarily between the four walls of a theatre. It could be a factory or in the open countryside, always seeking intimacy, darkness, silence and level ground.

In August Mercè and Estefanía began the task of writing about the journey they have made, the process they have undertaken, everything they have learned and experienced in many years working with boys and girls. During that first encounter they had the opportunity to share their material and began to shape the content of their project. This enabled them to exchange ideas about teaching dance, and from there various intuitions and paths suggested themselves, which they now wish to explore further.

This solo developed from a desire to find a shared language between circus, dance and theatre. Based on formal research, we now have this piece looking into the expressive possibilities of such a language. The emphasis in creating the piece is on generating a personal aesthetic and drama evolving from body language and equality among the elements of the performance, exploiting the potential of each in a symbiosis expressed through an atmosphere and narrative made up of all these components.
We sense a voice that makes no sound, but reasons all the time. It is the artifice of the time that is what we are, and it whispers in the silence of every mind: “I am the illusion of being someone”. The mystery of consciousness creates delusions of existence. The unconscious is revealed in what I believe I see. Memory is made up of dreams, memories lived by someone else and stimuli from the dark, saturated mass that is forgetting. The more we delve into an introspective disquisition, the more intimate are the answers, the more language deserts us, the more we are isolated by thought and the more exposed the void beneath what we supposed to be our personality, revealing to us, in our very presence, the disintegration of what we are - pure impersonality, the enigma of the I and its inevitable abandonment.
The residency at L’animal will take place in the weeks leading up to the premier planned at La Planeta in Gerona and will enable us to perfect and work on our acting and physical performance.

The artist Catalina Julve will have several sessions working on her new project Epistolario Manila/Manila Epistles.

OSSO CLUB, the artistic association of Piero Steiner, Andrés Corchero, Pep Ramis and Enric Ases, is made up of four artists with highly individual lines of creation but one shared aim: to share their personal ways of doing things, their views on theatre and movement.

“La sed y la revolución”/“Thirst and Revolution” focuses on apparently insignificant attitudes, gestures and dialogues that serve as metaphors for feelings that come from the depths and contradictions of the human soul.

Highlands is the title of the new production to be presented by the company in May 2021 at the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona. A piece that brings the Bach Project to a close, the last part of the tetralogy on the live music of Bach.
Highlands follows the path of research begun with Inventions, looking more deeply into the language to offer a performance piece.

A piece about spirituality, darkness and light.
White light and the inner darkness of the body.
Red blood runs through our bodies, light forms
its outlines. The interior cannot be illuminated.

A proposal for 15 performers: 7 dancers, 4 lyric singers and 4 string instrumentalists.
A piece about profundity, light, the language of movement and the resonance of live music.
A concert of space, bodies and music.

The music revolves around fragments of the Cantatas, the Partita no.II (with emphasis on the version of the Ciaccona for quartet of voices and violin) and some pieces from the Art of the Fugue by J.S. Bach, performed under the direction of Mal Pelo.

Highlands is the title of the new production to be presented by the company in May 2021 at the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona. A piece that brings the Bach Project to a close, the last part of the tetralogy on the live music of Bach.
Highlands follows the path of research begun with Inventions, looking more deeply into the language to offer a performance piece.

A piece about spirituality, darkness and light.
White light and the inner darkness of the body.
Red blood runs through our bodies, light forms
its outlines. The interior cannot be illuminated.

A proposal for 15 performers: 7 dancers, 4 lyric singers and 4 string instrumentalists.
A piece about profundity, light, the language of movement and the resonance of live music.
A concert of space, bodies and music.

The music revolves around fragments of the Cantatas, the Partita no.II (with emphasis on the version of the Ciaccona for quartet of voices and violin) and some pieces from the Art of the Fugue by J.S. Bach, performed under the direction of Mal Pelo.

Highlands is the title of the new production to be presented by the company in May 2021 at the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona. A piece that brings the Bach Project to a close, the last part of the tetralogy on the live music of Bach.
Highlands follows the path of research begun with Inventions, looking more deeply into the language to offer a performance piece.

A piece about spirituality, darkness and light.
White light and the inner darkness of the body.
Red blood runs through our bodies, light forms
its outlines. The interior cannot be illuminated.

A proposal for 15 performers: 7 dancers, 4 lyric singers and 4 string instrumentalists.
A piece about profundity, light, the language of movement and the resonance of live music.
A concert of space, bodies and music.

The music revolves around fragments of the Cantatas, the Partita no.II (with emphasis on the version of the Ciaccona for quartet of voices and violin) and some pieces from the Art of the Fugue by J.S. Bach, performed under the direction of Mal Pelo.

For the past twelve years a group of people involved in the visual arts have been meeting regularly to talk, share ideas, intuitions and experiences about research into the spiritual side of art. After holding several collective exhibitions, this group has decided to go ahead with an idea that has attracted us from the start: to create something together. The different “I”s working to give way to an integrated “we”.

Incierta Vía is an installation, the fruit of this work, offering a perception of the journey of human beings through time. From certainty to uncertainty. Primitive ignorance opening up to the possibility of being caught unawares by beauty and glimpsing the mystery of the ungraspable.

In parallel to this, we will hold a Forum on Contemporary Art and Spirituality. This will consist of a series of open conversations in which to share our questions, with people of different sensibilities and with the general public.

For the thirtieth anniversary of the Compañía Mariantònia Oliver, the artist has decided to “revisit” some of the pieces that have been significant in her career, bring them back to life and interpret them with all her accumulated experience and a fresh perspective.

La Continua is based on the concept of fragmentation as a basis for experiment and choreographic composition, in the creation of a situation of tense intimacy with the audience and by active, improvised involvement of spectators in the performance.

The stage is structured around a sofa. The idea is arbitrarily to invite spectators to sit on it and take an active part in the construction of our dramatic plot. This will entail a flow of improvisation, freshness and spontaneity and exposes us to risk and error. It will keep us on our toes and modify the lines of composition, like an open game in which no sooner do rules expire, new ones are invented.

ALFABET/Towards a score for object manipulation/Thinking with our hands

The aim of the research project ALFABETO is to decipher the complex score for manipulation that is used in the creative process in the theatre of objects. This challenge will be met by writing a Theatrical Essay looking into a possible methodology for composition with objects and all kinds of other materials.

Every family of objects needs its own expressive code, its own unique language. The difficulty lies in knowing how to make out the alphabet, later building simple sentences so as gradually to achieve your own native and original discourse. Learning how to listen, and the abstract, poetic interpretation of objects, is an exhaustive and exhausting process, but also a thrilling one. It is a journey into the abyss of the individual and collective unconscious that often fits completely organically into the time of exploration, play and study, like an old friend. This procedure requires constant training by the performer, so as to gain, through daily practice, the capacity to find the essence of the dynamics of expression and meaning of everyday objects and all the material around them. With great perseverance and concentration, gradually a score for manipulation will emerge, that will grow ever more autonomous, mobile and expansive.

Highlands is the title of the new production to be presented by the company in May 2021 at the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona. A piece that brings the Bach Project to a close, the last part of the tetralogy on the live music of Bach.
Highlands follows the path of research begun with Inventions, looking more deeply into the language to offer a performance piece.

A piece about spirituality, darkness and light.
White light and the inner darkness of the body.
Red blood runs through our bodies, light forms
its outlines. The interior cannot be illuminated.

A proposal for 15 performers: 7 dancers, 4 lyric singers and 4 string instrumentalists.
A piece about profundity, light, the language of movement and the resonance of live music.
A concert of space, bodies and music.

The music revolves around fragments of the Cantatas, the Partita no.II (with emphasis on the version of the Ciaccona for quartet of voices and violin) and some pieces from the Art of the Fugue by J.S. Bach, performed under the direction of Mal Pelo.

In August Mercè and Estefanía began the task of writing about the journey they have made, the process they have undertaken, everything they have learned and experienced in many years working with boys and girls. During that first encounter they had the opportunity to share their material and began to shape the content of their project. This enabled them to exchange ideas about teaching dance, and from there various intuitions and paths suggested themselves, which they now wish to explore further.

Adaptation of Mal Pelo’s 2020 creation for the Festival Temporada Alta, co-producer of the piece along with the Grec Festival de Barcelona.
Performances at Sant Pere de Galligans Church, Girona: https://temporada-alta.com/shows/inventions/

Inventions focusses on the relationship between live music and dance, placing the results of this research in spaces that, due to their resonance or architecture, make possible the magic triad of space-music-movement.
In each venue, Inventions will adopt a different form in keeping with that specific place.
We work with the depth and height of the space, with its resonance, and ensuring a good view for the audience.
We observe the particulars of the space for a few days to discover and reveal its potential for performance and sound.

The first stage of this new project will take place in 2020 at the following festivals:
Grec Festival Barcelona-Festival Bachcelona and Festival Internacional Temporada Alta de Girona.

Coordination of the 5th DesembreEnDansa/DanceDecember season, in collaboration with the arts department of the Ajuntament de Celrà and the Escuela Municipal de Danza de Celrà

The highlight of local activity is the organisation and celebration of the DanceDecember season that gives back to the town and its inhabitants the results of the long history of training and creative projects in Celrà since the 1990s.
The Arts Department of the Ayuntamiento de Celrà, in collaboration with the Escuela Municipal de Danza de Celrà and L’animal a l’esquena, co-produce for the fifth time this season dedicated specifically to dance, that will take place in various locations around the town.

The programme of shows will be complemented by training workshops given by some of the dancers and guest artists for young people from 15 upwards and also for local adults.

This year we are celebrating the 5th season and the 20th anniversary of the Escuela de Danza.

More info: www.ateneu.celra.cat

After the Rain is the provisional title for the next creative project from WONDERGROUND, a dance company formed by Roser Tutusaus and Tom Weksler. The project is a duet for the two performers, Tom and Roser, intended for a hall where movement, text and animation/projections will interact.

After the Rain hopes to be a kinetic poem, arising from the connection between temporary states of nature and the temporary states of our human minds and bodies. Inspired by textures and raw materials, we want to explore concepts such as change, uncertainty, beauty, imperfection and decadence.

RESIDENCY POSTPONED DUE TO COVID-19 PANDÈMIA

To mark the 30th anniversary of the Compañía Mariantònia Oliver, the artist proposes to “revisit” some of the pieces that have been important for her career, breathing new life into them and interpreting them with the benefit of experience and her current view point.

La Contínua Revisitada is based on the idea of fragmentation as a means of experimentation and choreographic composition, to create a situation of tense intimacy with the audience and to involve the spectator in an active, improvised manner in the performance.

The stage is structured around a sofa. The idea is arbitrarily to invite spectators to sit on it and take an active part in the construction of our dramatic plot. This will entail a flow of improvisation, freshness and spontaneity and exposes us to risk and error. It will keep us on our toes and modify the lines of composition, like an open game in which no sooner do rules expire, new ones are invented.

Mal Pelo resumes the tour of Pep Ramis’ solo The Mountain, the Truth and Paradise for the 2020-2021 season. Company rehearsals for the performance at the FAM Festival, Tenerife, Italy.

This solo piece grew out of the need to construct a personal fiction, to bring the experience of recent work up to date and look into current artistic interests. Working
as a solo artist also involves reviewing the tools of the trade gathered over a
long career as a performance creator.
The Mountain, the Truth & the Paradise is a poetic world questioning the
meaning of divinity and vulgarity, spirituality and ignorance, beauty and banality.

The performer’s ability to transform himself into a bare, blank space, and precision
of movement and voice are the main aims of the score of this piece, which offers
a journey full of variety, feeling and stimulation.

Adaptation of Mal Pelo’s 2020 creation for the Festival Temporada Alta, co-producer of the piece along with the Grec Festival de Barcelona.

Inventions focusses on the relationship between live music and dance, placing the results of this research in spaces that, due to their resonance or architecture, make possible the magic triad of space-music-movement.
In each venue, Inventions will adopt a different form in keeping with that specific place.
We work with the depth and height of the space, with its resonance, and ensuring a good view for the audience.
We observe the particulars of the space for a few days to discover and reveal its potential for performance and sound.

The first stage of this new project will take place in 2020 at the following festivals:
Grec Festival Barcelona-Festival Bachcelona and Festival Internacional Temporada Alta de Girona.

RESIDENCY POSTPONED DUE TO COVID-19 PANDÈMIA

Ritmia is a dance project with live music, exploring relationships of perception and composition between visual rhythm and rhythm in sound. Using the interaction between percussion and choreography based on complex rhythmic structures, multi-sensorial polyrhythms are created that make us question our perception of sound, movement, time and space.

The Sensory Side of Things is an investigation into the pairing of fragmentation and articulation, applied to thought, movement and other “Things” that make up the identity of a performance piece. The project is driven by a desire to share, in the creative journey of a solo, in interviews and laboratories, the questions that arise from the theoretical and physical territories crossed in the composition of a piece of work.

Every piece I do begins (or continues) with the desire to work on something latent that is pushing to come out. The process is put together with a group of people in a very intuitive way, trying out a lot of things that often go nowhere, big ideas appearing and fizzling out, crises and discoveries until finally the material is there. At a certain moment the decisions arise that will shape the piece, we lament for what has to be left out and celebrate what remains (that is when the work as such takes its own decisions and responds to its own needs, becoming somehow independent of us). When the piece is performed for the first time our colleagues arrive, and the public, the debate is opened up and we begin to understand what we have made, a living thing. The “new” piece I want to make comes from ongoing concerns from my previous work: “En la sombra de un elefante” (“In the Shade of an Elephant”) and “Retrato de un monstruo” (“Portrait of a Monster”).

Pep Ramis and Maria Muñoz will offer a workshop where you can experience the mechanisms of action and what they can unleash. A look at movement and body-writing in action.
Precision, duration, commitment, intensities, silence, absences, presences, punctuation, habitability, capitulation, phrasiing, lineality, timing, musicality, rhythm and writing are some of the terms we shall be looking at during the course.
To Act: 1. To carry out an action, 2 To make movements and gestures to make something understood, 3 To activate a mechanism.
The Mal Pelo workshops are given by the two co-directors of the company, without implying the presence of the two in each session.

details

Group LaBolsa
Agrupación de creadores internacionales involucrados en la búsqueda de prácticas performativas en la creación en vivo

El acto de retratarse, como lo conocemos en la pintura, la fotografía, la escultura o también en las artes audiovisuales, pone un marco íntimo al individuo y desvela su singularidad. A la vez el retrato revela al retratista, su interés, su atención, sus obsesiones, su deseo de existir dentro de su obra o a través de ella. ¿Qué esconde? ¿Qué deja emerger?
El colectivo Group LaBolsa propone un viaje en torno al retrato escénico, que reflexiona sobre la sensible condición humana, la fragilidad del individuo dentro del colectivo y la necesidad de pertenecer a algo más allá de lo individual.

Pep Ramis and Maria Muñoz will offer a workshop where you can experience the mechanisms of action and what they can unleash. A look at movement and body-writing in action.
Precision, duration, commitment, intensities, silence, absences, presences, punctuation, habitability, capitulation, phrasiing, lineality, timing, musicality, rhythm and writing are some of the terms we shall be looking at during the course.
To Act: 1. To carry out an action, 2 To make movements and gestures to make something understood, 3 To activate a mechanism.
The Mal Pelo workshops are given by the two co-directors of the company, without implying the presence of the two in each session.

details

Mal Pelo resumes the tour of Pep Ramis’ solo The Mountain, the Truth and Paradise for the 2020-2021 season. Company rehearsals for the performance at the FAM Festival, Tenerife, Italy.

This solo piece grew out of the need to construct a personal fiction, to bring the experience of recent work up to date and look into current artistic interests. Working
as a solo artist also involves reviewing the tools of the trade gathered over a
long career as a performance creator.
The Mountain, the Truth & the Paradise is a poetic world questioning the
meaning of divinity and vulgarity, spirituality and ignorance, beauty and banality.

Observar un jardín con amor significa aprender a vivir despacio.
Parar. Y descubrir el lenguaje de aquello que habla sin palabras.
Sumergirse en el silencio.
Dejarse inundar.
Nadar en él.

“Silencio” es una obra de teatro de objetos que nace de dos poéticas; la manipulación objetual y la Lengua de Signos (LSE). Una obra sobre el silencio y una gran instalación de objetos y autómatas en movimiento en la que tanto público oyente como sordo, compartirán un espacio común de comprensión y contemplación.

Observar un jardín con amor significa aprender a vivir despacio.
Parar. Y descubrir el lenguaje de aquello que habla sin palabras.
Sumergirse en el silencio.
Dejarse inundar.
Nadar en él.

“Silencio” es una obra de teatro de objetos que nace de dos poéticas; la manipulación objetual y la Lengua de Signos (LSE). Una obra sobre el silencio y una gran instalación de objetos y autómatas en movimiento en la que tanto público oyente como sordo, compartirán un espacio común de comprensión y contemplación.

Compañía: Cía M.A.R
Autora Andrea Díaz Reboredo
Intérpretes: Miriam Garlo y Andrea Díaz.
Mirada externa: Xavier Bobés Solá
Diseño y construcción objetual: Andrea y Pablo Reboredo(s)
*Resto del equipo por confirmar

Ainhoa Hernández is part of the Hypotenuse triangle, Catalonia-Madrid-Vitoria, in the circulation of performers between the three organisations. She is the performer proposed by the Teatro Pradillo in Madrid for 2019-2020.

Blooming-floresencia is a project of long term artistic research tackling new ways to promote learning and sensibility that set in motion new kinds of sensation, new cosmologies. For recovery or imagination, other ways of explaining the world or telling its story are necessary. Other ways already exist, but have been discarded or deliberately neglected.

Hypotenuse Project – Collaboration with Azala, Vitòria and Teatre Pradillo, Madrid

Ainhoa Hernández is part of the Hypotenuse triangle, Catalonia-Madrid-Vitoria, in the circulation of performers between the three organisations. She is the performer proposed by the Teatro Pradillo in Madrid for 2019-2020.

Blooming-floresencia is a project of long term artistic research tackling new ways to promote learning and sensibility that set in motion new kinds of sensation, new cosmologies. For recovery or imagination, other ways of explaining the world or telling its story are necessary. Other ways already exist, but have been discarded or deliberately neglected.

After working for twenty years keeping children company as they experience the joys and fulfilment of dance, Mercè and Estefanía want to write the story of their artistic and teaching experiences both in schools and in extracurricular activities.

“We need, and have promised ourselves, to stop and think and to write, just as during these years we have needed to ‘pause to dance’”.

After working for twenty years keeping children company as they experience the joys and fulfilment of dance, Mercè and Estefanía want to write the story of their artistic and teaching experiences both in schools and in extracurricular activities.

“We need, and have promised ourselves, to stop and think and to write, just as during these years we have needed to ‘pause to dance’”.

The Sensory Side of Things is an investigation into the pairing of fragmentation and articulation, applied to thought, movement and other “Things” that make up the identity of a performance piece. The project is driven by a desire to share, in the creative journey of a solo, in interviews and laboratories, the questions that arise from the theoretical and physical territories crossed in the composition of a piece of work.

The research proposal for this project arose out of a personal interest in taking a closer look at two elements that are crucial to the artistic moment my work has reached now. The first is the relationship between the public and what is happening artistically, and everything that revolves around this dichotomy; the second is the way mixed and hybrid genres coexist in artistic constructs for performance.

Taking an active part in the postmodern world and living with this situation of social and artistic deconstruction, I find myself in a situation of continual adjustment between what I understand as an artistic event and my desire to find different kinds of relationship between the performance and the audience who come to a venue with their prejudices and habits acquired from a particular society at a particular time.

Zoltàn Vakulya, who has worked with Mal Pelo since 2018, is planning a research residency for a new piece, together with Chen-Wei Lee.
Passing Measures, now at the creation stage, will be a dance piece. Wei and Zoltán have worked together before on projects such as Together Alone, in which they focussed on the challenge of the closeness between dancers. In Passing Measures they hope to navigate through words that vanish and disappear, exploring their shared vocabulary.

Creation: Altitude 2/ Chen-Wei Lee & Vakulya Zoltán
Dance: Zoltán Vakulya

Dear friends,


Given the current situation, we are following the measures for the prevention and containment of COVID-19. L’animal a l’esquena has cancelled all planned activities until further notice. Our buildings will remain closed, as will our administrative office.

The programme of creation residencies has been suspended for the time being and will be resumed as soon as circumstances allow.

We shall reply to requests as quickly as possible. L’animal will give priority to finding alternative dates for residencies that have already been booked and have to be cancelled and, according to what dates may then be available, will allocate these to new residencies that are now pending confirmation.

We are working online to attend to any enquiries. You can contact us at info@lanimal.org
Thank you for your understanding. In the hope that together we can overcome this crisis, we look forward to being able to open the doors of L’animal again soon.

Stay well, keep safe and be creative in your daily lives.

Until soon! Bye for now.

Mal Pelo begins the creation process for its new piece, to be premiered at the next Grec Festival in
Barcelona.
Inventions focuses on the relationship between live music and dance, situating the results of this research in
spaces that, due to their acoustics or architecture, make possible the magic triad of space-music-movement.
In each of these places Inventions will take a different form, adapted to the specific venue.
The aim of Inventions is to look into the particular acoustic and performance characteristics of each venue, of
the architecture and the dynamics of the space where the piece is to be performed. The research will cover
the historical background, materials, light, sound and capacity for transformation of each of the chosen
places.
Listening to these details enables us to reveal performance potential and construct unique proposals
specifically for each environment.
The first stage of this new project will take place in 2020 at the following festivals: Grec Festival de
Barcelona-Festival Bachcelona, Festival Internacional Música de Torroella and Festival Internacional
Temporada Alta de Girona.

The dancer Leonor Leal has her own way of doing things and the idea of the project LOXA is to consolidate
that. She sticks to her collaborators and so here we have Pedro G Romero as writer. María Muñoz and Pep
Ramis (Mal Pelo) will also be there, directing the performance as María Muñoz has already done on “J.R.T.”
and “Nocturno”.
Here too are Antonio Moreno (percussion) and Juan Jiménez (sax) of Proyecto Lorca, who live, as she does,
in Utrera. Then the great Tomás de Perrate (song), the very essence of Utrera, and María Marín (guitar and
song), who is also from Utrera though now in the Netherlands. And Dani de Morón (guitar), an impressive
guitarist who, as his name suggests, comes from Morón de la Frontera, so closely linked in Flamenco to
Utrera.

An investigation into origins, ancestry, roots, the force that pulls us into the earth and gives us the power to
fly…
A mane of hair inhabited by a mythological being, the symbiosis between animality and sensuality, a process
of growth.

Contrakant is above all a space that doesn’t yet exist and needs to be activated. The energy that activates this space of real friction is rage. Rage against Kant. Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher who developed his ideas during the 18th Century, was the first proponent of Criticism and the father of German idealism. He is now considered one of the most important figures of modern European and universal thought.
Contrakant will consist of a series of encounters between artists using the practices and tools they each bring to look into a set of questions. To avoid an excess of a priori work that might somehow kill off the unknown paths down which this research might reach, we’ll only settle on the basic questions to be put in play at the first meeting. Contrakant will be a series of encounters numbered Contrakant 1, 2, 3… so that following on from the work done in Contrakant 1, and according to the results, problems and questions arising from it, we’ll think how to go about the next encounter.

The association of Piero Steiner, Andrés Corchero, Pep Ramis and Enric Ases, OSSO CLUB, brings together four artists with very singular creative stories but one shared aim: to pool their individual ways of doing things, their vision of theatre and movement.

La sed y la revolución/Thirst and Revolution focuses on apparently insignificant attitudes, gestures and conversations, used as metaphors for feelings related to the depths and contradictions of the human soul.

ATTENTION: maximum capacity for 25 people, reservation required

Corpus presents the encounter between a sculpture, a manipulator of objects and a musician, in the hope of making room for the eloquence of silence and stillness. A fugue for three, unexpected counterpoint, a change of scale, so that, if only for an instant, the invisible can shine through.

Corpus explores the movement of a sculpture in relation to the body - human, animal or vegetable -, giving shape to the bond that everyone has with his or her “body object”, revealing its poetic sense and studying its potential interpretation, transformation and representation both as plastic art and in movement.

Mal Pelo will begin 2020 by resuming the tour of its latest piece, On Goldberg Variations/Variations, at the Teatro Central de Sevilla.

The piece On Goldberg Variations/Variations is based on the musical work Goldberg Variations/Variations by the French-American pianist and composer Dan Tepfer, in which he performs J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations in combination with his own variations improvised on the same harmonies.

On Goldberg Variations/Variations twines together lines of language to make a weaving around the work of J.S. Bach. Dance, the voice of John Berger, texts of their own, the manipulated, multifocal sound of the soundtrack, live voice and video projections combine to create this approach by Mal Pelo to the universe of J.S. Bach.
The choreography is attuned to the particular musicality of each performer and the rhythmic and dynamic dialogue between the group and the space.

Pep Ramis and Maria Muñoz will offer a workshop where you can experience the mechanisms of action and what they can unleash. A look at movement and body-writing in action.
Precision, duration, commitment, intensities, silence, absences, presences, punctuation, habitability, capitulation, phrasiing, lineality, timing, musicality, rhythm and writing are some of the terms we shall be looking at during the course.
To Act: 1. To carry out an action, 2 To make movements and gestures to make something understood, 3 To activate a mechanism.
The Mal Pelo workshops are given by the two co-directors of the company, without implying the presence of the two in each session.

details

Because sometimes love means knowing how to let go.

After 24 years sharing their professional and personal lives, Mónica and Colate are setting out on their last dance tour. At an altitude of 4000 metres, the desert of the Andes will test the limits of their relationship and of their bodies.

DUO is a van journey through the arid borderlands between Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. It is also a piece of contemporary dance set in schools and squares in remote villages. And an inner journey for two individuals trying to keep their balance as they come up against their physical and emotional limits.

EXCHANGE OF KNOWLEDGE, CREATION AND PROMOTION

The Ritmo network was founded in Dunkirk in 2017 by the Théâtre la Licorne and now includes six artistic organizations and four promotional organizations in five countries. The members of this project want to build an international network around the theatre of puppets and objects, with the aim of discovering new artistic practices and aesthetics and finding new ways to look at the relationship with the audience.
The first subject chosen by all members of the Nomad Academy is biography.
What is a biography?
How do you (re)construct a person’s life?
Do you create, invent biographies of fictional characters or seek inspiration in the lives of people who really existed (whether or not they are well known)?

Geometry carries emotion within itself. We are always associating shapes and symbols with meanings, memories, history and feelings. How to discover what images, simple and raw shapes are held within us? Thinking Squares is the beginning of a new creation process which delves into the exploration of body movement starting from selected pre-existing geometries, set scores and pre-drawn spatial pathways. Our interest lies in discovering how these structures affect us and how they change our body movement, our choices of being in space and interrelating with other. By using tools such as deconstruction, dissection, collage and replacement we are interested in opening up the many ways we have of looking at the same thing.

Because sometimes love means knowing how to let go.

After 24 years sharing their professional and personal lives, Mónica and Colate are setting out on their last dance tour. At an altitude of 4000 metres, the desert of the Andes will test the limits of their relationship and of their bodies.

DUO is a van journey through the arid borderlands between Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. It is also a piece of contemporary dance set in schools and squares in remote villages. And an inner journey for two individuals trying to keep their balance as they come up against their physical and emotional limits.

Retratos Errantes/Errant Portraits investigates how to emphasise the individuality of the creative worlds of each performer, with the attentive accompaniment of the company Mal Pelo. The interest in this encounter lies in showing how one group of creators/performers can offer multiple perspectives on each individual within the collective.

This year we will be holding the fourth season of Dance December, which builds on the long history of training and creative projects in the municipality of Celrà since the 1990s. The Arts Department of Celrà Town Hall, in collaboration with the Escuela Municipal de Danza de Celrà (Celrà Municipal Dance School) and L’animal a l’esquena, are organising for the fourth time this season of dance, held in various locations around the town.
The programme of shows is complemented by workshops led by some of the guest dancers and artists for young people of 15 upwards and also for adults.

For more information see:
https://ateneucelra.koobin.com/

On Goldberg Variations/Variations is the first part of the Bach Project, a piece for seven performers in collaboration with the French-American musician Dan Tepfer.
The Goldberg Variations were composed for keyboard in 1741. They consist of a single theme, an aria, thirty variations and a reprise of the aria. What links them all is not a shared melody but a background of harmonic variations on the bass line. The tunes may vary but underlying them is a constant theme. Dan Tepfer, in his Goldberg Variations/Variations, offers J S Bach’s Goldberg Variations combined with his own variations improvised on the same harmonies. As a performer and composer, Dan Tepfer has vast experience in classical, jazz and electronic music.

During my artistic residency at L’animal a l’esquena I hope to finish my book “the creative body”, a personal project based on conversations with the dance artist David Zambrano.

I have been following David Zambrano in his world for two years. Little by little. We have talked, I’ve observed his workshops and taken part in his classes.

I have researched his career right from the start up till now, his creative process. From all this analysis I have kept what I consider most relevant and what I believe may interest people from different fields: dancers, choreographers, artists, creators, teachers, entrepreneurs or researchers, among others.

La melancolía del turista/The Melancholy of the Tourist is a hall of mirrors held up by what remains of a sublimated landscape, that no longer exists or never did: a state where things dissolve in time, sometimes reviving through traces of memory and certain pockets of resistance. It comes from a search through various tourist spots, from which we have recovered instants and objects that speak of the rise and fall of this fantasy. But melancholy is also a mood of suspense that goes along with the exception, an active force driving us towards the desire to reinvent and reinvent ourselves in these lapses where inertia is shattered.

En lo alto para siempre/Forever Overhead is a performance project based on texts from “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” by David Foster Wallace.

The lie is that it’s one or the other. A still, floating bee is moving faster than it can think. From overhead the sweetness drives it crazy.

Forever Overhead is a creation based on the story of the same name by the US writer David Foster Wallace. An apparently simple story that describes the emotional journey, fluctuating between ecstasy and calvary, of a youth who decides to jump from a diving board for the first time. A leap into the void that we have all experienced at some point and that, in this case, allows us to delve deeper into the literary and personal world of David Foster Wallace; a phantasmagorical vision, at once prophetic and hilarious, that x-rays a society on the edge of the abyss.

If you wanted you could stay up here forever, fluttering so rapidly inside that you would float, motionless in time, like a bee floating above some sweet substance.

We have planned our first international outreach project as part of our collaboration with La Caldera Les Corts, enabling figures from the world of contemporary dance to visit Catalonia and putting on a programme of events so as to bring these international names together with Catalan creators whether in the context of training, exhibitions, master classes, communication or laboratories. It is within this framework that from 28th October to 15th November this coming autumn, L’animal and La Caldera are inviting the distinguished US movement researcher and creator Lisa Nelson to be their guest.

Since both organisations were interested in the legendary US choreographer Lisa Nelson, they held discussions with a view to inviting her to spend a week at L’animal a l’esquena with creators connected to this arts centre in Celrà and regular members of the company Mal Pelo. Later some of these artists and other international guests invited by Lisa held a week-long creation laboratory at La Caldera, the results of which will be presented as part of the Corpografías programme. To complete this immersion in her world, Lisa will share her working methodology Tuning Scores as part of the Sporá Prógram season.

This solo piece grew out of the need to construct a personal fiction, to bring the experience of recent work up to date and look into current artistic interests. Working
as a solo artist also involves reviewing the tools of the trade gathered over a
long career as a performance creator.
The Mountain, the Truth & the Paradise is a poetic world questioning the
meaning of divinity and vulgarity, spirituality and ignorance, beauty and banality.
The performer’s ability to transform himself into a bare, blank space, and precision
of movement and voice are the main aims of the score of this piece, which offers
a journey full of variety, feeling and stimulation.

On Goldberg Variations/Variations is the first part of the Bach Project, a piece for seven performers in collaboration with the French-American musician Dan Tepfer.
The Goldberg Variations were composed for keyboard in 1741. They consist of a single theme, an aria, thirty variations and a reprise of the aria. What links them all is not a shared melody but a background of harmonic variations on the bass line. The tunes may vary but underlying them is a constant theme. Dan Tepfer, in his Goldberg Variations/Variations, offers J S Bach’s Goldberg Variations combined with his own variations improvised on the same harmonies. As a performer and composer, Dan Tepfer has vast experience in classical, jazz and electronic music.

Pep Ramis and Maria Muñoz will offer a workshop where you can experience the mechanisms of action and what they can unleash. A look at movement and body-writing in action.
Precision, duration, commitment, intensities, silence, absences, presences, punctuation, habitability, capitulation, phrasiing, lineality, timing, musicality, rhythm and writing are some of the terms we shall be looking at during the course.
To Act: 1. To carry out an action, 2 To make movements and gestures to make something understood, 3 To activate a mechanism.

details

Pep Ramis and Maria Muñoz will offer a workshop where you can experience the mechanisms of action and what they can unleash. A look at movement and body-writing in action.
Precision, duration, commitment, intensities, silence, absences, presences, punctuation, habitability, capitulation, phrasiing, lineality, timing, musicality, rhythm and writing are some of the terms we shall be looking at during the course.
To Act: 1. To carry out an action, 2 To make movements and gestures to make something understood, 3 To activate a mechanism.

details

The return of Bhum! (Human Frontier Manifesto)

This sixth Bhum! is special. We would like to celebrate with all of you the 30th anniversary of Mal Pelo, patron and driving force behind L’animal a l’esquena. We’re holding the event at home, in Celrà, the village that has welcomed us so warmly since the first day.
We would also like to celebrate Mal Pelo and L’animal’s long relationship with Baró d’Evel Cirk Cie, who are joining us in the design of this latest event.

This Bhum! will also count on the vital presence of creators, technicians and volunteers who take part for no profit to themselves, in support of L’animal and its place on the cultural map of this country.

Based on her research project “Rehearsals for Nothing”, Monica Valenciano is still shaping a long term process that began in 2017. Her idea is that this should develop through a cycle of contiguous, interdependent pieces.

Like cards that can be shuffled, these pieces can be mixed to produce different compositions and readings all revolving around an exploration of language using the voice of the body - Writing and the Acoustics of movement - The function of the Weaving of space and the Body as a Place of Apparition, the Orchestral or Polyphonic Body.

Like many of Marta Izquierdo Muñoz’s projects, her present one ties in with previous work. Practice Makes Perfect (2017) and IMAGO-GO (2018) shared a basic, archaic object: a stick. Traditional stick dances were explored in the former and in the latter entertainers carried a long pole. In this new piece, Guérillères, we find a choreographic framework in a community in action: where in IMAGO-GO this was a little rigid and dysfunctional, here it will be chaotic, organic and utopian.

What Pep Aymerich’s (Sarrià de Dalt, 1962), artistic projects have in common, apart from their diversity and scale, is the presence of the body as a reference point, the precise judgement of the measure of possibilities and reactions of the material he works on, the rigour, conciseness and quality of the finished product. As a craftsman working with wood who is committed (in all meanings of the word) to creating a world with his hands, his work becomes a liturgy for the gaze. In all his creations a profound need for transcendence can be seen, a constant questioning of the conflict of man confronted with the fragility of his existence.

Geometry carries emotion within itself. We are always associating shapes and symbols with meanings, memories, history and feelings. How to discover what images, simple and raw shapes are held within us? Thinking Squares is the beginning of a new creation process which delves into the exploration of body movement starting from selected pre-existing geometries, set scores and pre-drawn spatial pathways. Our interest lies in discovering how these structures affect us and how they change our body movement, our choices of being in space and interrelating with other. By using tools such as deconstruction, dissection, collage and replacement we are interested in opening up the many ways we have of looking at the same thing.

Retratos Errantes/Errant Portraits investigates how to emphasise the individuality of the creative worlds of each performer, with the attentive accompaniment of the company Mal Pelo. The interest in this encounter lies in showing how one group of creators/performers can offer multiple perspectives on each individual within the collective.

In this writing residency we shall be concentrating on continuing to write ”Cuadernos sobre el tocar” (“Notebooks on Touching”), a collection of notebooks that systemise the practice of Touching Improvisation we have been developing over the past two years. The notebooks form part of the Radiación +++/Radiation +++ project run by La Panera Arts Centre and the Arnau Hospital in Vilanova de Lleida, with support from the Fundación Daniel & Nina Carasso. We are also starting to prepare for our next production, “Fulgor” (“Glow”) (2021) and in this residency we shall begin to think about the language needed for the project. Using the research we have carried out in recent years into skin and touch, we shall return to the theatre and turn it into a huge dark room. Loosely inspired by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, “Fulgor” will offer a sensual journey in which butterfly-bodies will appear as a delicate and vivid phantasmagoria, impossible to keep hold of.

In this first phase of the creation of El aspecto sensorial de las cosas (provisional title), Federica Porello will look into the multi-faceted potential of the various elements of the stage: the performer, objects, light and sound. She is interested in studying the different degrees of presence in a performer, from being observed to addressing the audience directly, and the different states of the silent audience: contemplative, decoding enigmas, receptive…
The ingredients for the research will be the different kinds of relationship between movement and music (visual representation of the sound, coexistence, dialogue…) and between actions and objects (manipulation, animation, interdependence…).
Her original reference points will be the musical pieces Il trillo del diavolo by Giuseppe Tartini, Sonata for Cello Solo by György Ligeti and Moto perpetuo, Op. 11 by Niccolò Paganini.
The objects she will begin working with will be pieces of wood, either singly or linked to create jointed objects.

This is a first the edit for a solo-work, performed by myself sometime next year (2020).

For the human beings, since we know our own history we were drawn to challenge ourselves trough conquering and to getting know. Land, knowledge, each other.
It isn’t so di?erent in the nature of artists and for dance makers especially. Choreographers, dancers, teachers, researchers since the Judson Church movement are viciously ‘fighting’ the ‘old’ and inventing, taking on the ‘new’.
Dance as a performing art form has evolved and still shaping itself in a high speed by freeing itself from rules, melting and fusing with other media and discovering new territories.

As a continuation of the piece Diamant, Animal Locomotion treats dance and the body as a realm of mysterious imagination, a subtle place where our deepest selves are expressed in the image of music. This solo by Lorena Calandín will be inspired by her unique character as a performer and the work of Muybridge and Marey, precursors of the cinema, known for their photographic deconstructions of movement (chronophotography). Through their work, these artists tried to unravel the mystery of the impalpable nature of movement and above all, like other researchers throughout history, of dance. It is this precise intersection of science, art and mystery that is the starting point for Animal Locomotion. These images provide inspiration, with their repetitive, hypnotic structure, fascinating in its potential for discrepancy. The title Animal Locomotion also refers to the question of our human condition and destiny.

Choreography, concept: Christophe Le Goff
Performance: Lorena Calandín
Based on an original idea by: Inma Marcos
Lighting and set: Amandine Gerome
Production: Lynda Miguel
Administration: Alice Normand

During this residency Idoia Zabaleta will revise the lateral material from her recent creation processes. By lateral materials I mean those that are not central to the creation process but nevertheless keep me company as “good friends” and help me much more than they think. They are modest materials, simple passers by, loyal, that are there through thick and thin, that remind you where you come from, that help you distract yourself or confront contradictions when necessary, that come to visit you, that you can call anytime, that know they won’t come out in the film but don’t mind, even prefer it that way because they are embarrassed, but that always somehow end up as extras or making the sandwiches for the trip. It’s a question of friendship and therefore of time. These are latent images (doors, windows, walls, holes, meadows, caves…), ways of doing things (horizontal, from cold to hot with nothing in between, getting dirty…), gestures (opening and closing your hands, opening and closing your mouth, irradiating the sternum…), prayers (I have time, come on, it wasn’t me, get out if you can, for dear life…), songs (hil zara by Ibon r / g, gure oroitzapenak by Mursego, como lobos by Ainara LeGardon, a shepherds’ song by Chumo de Alvaro Barriuso…) and tangential thoughts (throwing things in the air to see what happens, crosswords, journeys…).

The ancestral nature of the human nomad, the sense of a community that moves from one place to another and never settles permanently anywhere.
Exploring the value of the individual in a collective. Looking into personal movement and what brings us together as a group.
A collective body that needs other bodies. Bodies without gender roles.
What happens when different bodies meet as part of the same expressive migration process? What kinds of relationships are formed?
Migration as both exterior and interior movement, that breaks through frontiers and boundaries, allowing for shifts and learning in bodies, disciplines, languages, bodies.
Migration as evolution.

Contrakant is above all a space that doesn’t yet exist and needs to be activated. The energy that activates this space of real friction is rage. Rage against Kant. Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher who developed his ideas during the 18th Century, was the first proponent of Criticism and the father of German idealism. He is now considered one of the most important figures of modern European and universal thought.
Contrakant will consist of a series of encounters between artists using the practices and tools they each bring to look into a set of questions. To avoid an excess of a priori work that might somehow kill off the unknown paths down which this research might reach, we’ll only settle on the basic questions to be put in play at the first meeting. Contrakant will be a series of encounters numbered Contrakant 1, 2, 3… so that following on from the work done in Contrakant 1, and according to the results, problems and questions arising from it, we’ll think how to go about the next encounter.

Piero Steiner, Andres Corchero, Pep Ramis and Enric Ases return, under the eye of María Muñoz, to the piece premiered at the last Festival de Otoño de Cataluña Temporada Alta Girona/Salt in 2018. A week of creation to resume work on their piece, which will appear at the upcoming Grec Festival in Barcelona.

Four men of the same age, the same height and with one aim: a search for new horizons of expression and a shared language that will enable them to reach spectators right in their gut. Four men united by the complicity of their generation and a common interest in certain themes and performance strategies.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
This is Water. D.F. Wallace

Juan Navarro and Gonzalo Cunill will work together again on a performance project, this time with the aim of taking a closer look at the life and work of the author of Infinite Jest. Their starting point is the lecture This is Water, which David Foster Wallace delivered on 21st May 2005 at the graduation ceremony for the prestigious Kenyon College in Ohio. That day, Wallace proposed facing the fact that “the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about”. On this occasion we find him lively and optimistic, far from the demons that tortured him until his suicide in 2008.

Pep Ramis and Maria Muñoz will offer a workshop where you can experience the mechanisms of action and what they can unleash. A look at movement and body-writing in action.
Precision, duration, commitment, intensities, silence, absences, presences, punctuation, habitability, capitulation, phrasiing, lineality, timing, musicality, rhythm and writing are some of the terms we shall be looking at during the course.
To Act: 1. To carry out an action, 2 To make movements and gestures to make something understood, 3 To activate a mechanism.

details

This is a piece made by two creators from different eras who coincide at the same time. They work on the duality of one being, on confrontation with the other and with oneself. We’ll build the relationship of life size puppet replicas of father and daughter, a cadence of antagonism and affinity between the two.

How should I dance for, towards and about someone who is absent? How do I leave him or her, so as to continue dancing for the next person?

In this choreographic solo, Pau wants to develop his role as an independent performer-creator, which is emerging parallel to his current work as a teacher, after working for years as a permanent member of the
Tanztheater Wuppertal-Pina Bausch. The title of the piece is “Wi(n)dow”. The “n” is framed by its own window between brackets, and marks the potential of presence in absence.

“LLOPS TRISTOS (SAD WOLVES)” takes place in a Museum of Contemporary Art. One of those completely white museums. Various people happen to bump into each other: the assistant director, the director’s secretary, a young man and woman doing a casting for a performance. At first some are working and the others passing by. But gradually they will nearly all end up living in the Museum, one literally and others in spirit. The white space fills up. But this is because outside everything is growing more and more senseless, emptying.

Leonor Leal vuelve a L’animal en l’esquena en un primer laboratorio durante este 2019 para iniciar un nuevo trabajo de solo de esta bailaora de Jerez de la Frontera.
En esta ocasión habrá un trabajo de investigación entre las dos creadoras a partir de la formación en flamenco de Leonor Leal. María Muñoz ha colaborado en las últimas creaciones de Leonor Leal desde la ayudantía artística. Leonor viene a L’animal para compartir con María Muñoz su disciplina e iniciar así un nuevo proceso creativo entre ambas.

There is a recurring landscape within me. Immense, immeasurable, far from all else.
The desert is almost always a single, straight line, boring and unchanging… When did it begin?
When does it end?
It is its apparent stillness that gives it its monotony and unforeseen movements are what break through it.
Is it possible to create a path through this landscape?

“mud looks at mud and understands that it is beautiful”

SOMA (provisional title) is an experiment in performance and material that focuses on a study of the body and movement as shadow and fragment. Weight and measure are an expression of its power and its disappearance, the necessary crack and abyss. An escape from ritual.
This is an installation and performance shared by dancer, sculptor and lighting expert, passing through different physical states, aesthetic concepts and qualities of movement, relating with each other and blurring their roles through sculptures, material, ambiances, objects and choreography that develop in a space formed before the spectator’s eyes.

The design of the human anatomy, like that of any other animal, encourages movement and this therefore makes us healthy. The progressive loss of awareness of our own vital rhythms leads to badly co-ordinated, inharmonious and restricted movement. Understanding how our organism is structured will help us recover and develop a balanced body language.


From 11.00 to 18.00 at L’animal a l’esquena
Price: 70,00 euros
If you are interested, email to enrol at info@lanimal.org

Mal Pelo is continuing to work on the creation process for a new piece to be premiered on March 28th at the TNC.
María Muñoz has performed Bach, based on pieces from The Well Tempered Clavier, in many countries. Following on from this, Mal Pelo are continuing their research into a profound and dynamic language combining dance and music in dialogue with the work of J S Bach. The Bach Project provides the umbrella for three years of research on a multi-focal project on movement and the work of the German composer, based on a study of baroque music and its relationship with movement, space and choreographic composition.

In January Mal Pelo is continuing to work on the creation process for a new piece to be premiered on March 28th at the TNC.
María Muñoz has performed Bach, based on pieces from The Well Tempered Clavier, in many countries. Following on from this, Mal Pelo are continuing their research into a profound and dynamic language combining dance and music in dialogue with the work of J S Bach. The Bach Project provides the umbrella for three years of research on a multi-focal project on movement and the work of the German composer, based on a study of baroque music and its relationship with movement, space and choreographic composition.

Pep Ramis and Maria Muñoz will offer a workshop where you can experience the mechanisms of action and what they can unleash. A look at movement and body-writing in action.
Precision, duration, commitment, intensities, silence, absences, presences, punctuation, habitability, capitulation, phrasiing, lineality, timing, musicality, rhythm and writing are some of the terms we shall be looking at during the course.
To Act: 1. To carry out an action, 2 To make movements and gestures to make something understood, 3 To activate a mechanism.

details

María Muñoz’ residency at L’animal a l’esquena from 17th to 22nd December is part of the project Counterpoint and choreographic composition (The voices of the body, space and the contrapuntal music of the baroque), for which she has obtained a research grant from the Arts Department of the Generalitat de Catalunya. She has worked on this project during 2018 at L’animal a l’esquena, the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz (Berlin, Germany), the Centro de Creación Azala (Basque Country) and at Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson’s base in Vermont (USA).
The performance on 22nd December will be structured as a talk and practical demonstration and María Muñoz will be joined for this by Jordi Casanovas, Pep Ramis, Federica Porello and Zuriñe Benavente, who have followed the various research workshops that have been held during the year.

Summary:
Research into the possible relationships between the contrapuntal music of the baroque, the body as a framework and source of different voices, and space as a generator of choreographic experience. Through a methodology based mainly on practice but also on reflection and analysis, the idea is to approach the work by focussing on all the possibilities that can be offered by a single body, so as to define different phases of choreographic composition and afterwards transpose this study onto several bodies in a joint composition.
The question being asked here is how the technique of musical counterpoint might find a correlation in choreographic composition.

Key Words:
Choreographic composition, counterpoint, fugue, canon, imitation, variation, fragmentation, subject against subject, tensegrity, kinosphere, improvisation.

Background:
In 2004 María Muñoz presented a project based on pieces taken from The Well Tempered Clavier. The performance piece Bach grew out of a study of the pieces that make up this long work by Johan Sebastian Bach, a collection of two series of twenty four Preludes and Fugues. The piece combines dances to preludes played live with the memory of fugues danced in silence. The many performances of this piece between then and now have provided an opportunity to develop the composition in detail, through learning to listen to the music.

This experience has awoken in María Muñoz a curiosity to broaden her knowledge of counterpoint as a tool for composition and of the concepts of the body and movement in space set out by great artists such as Laban, Forsyth, Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson.

The ideas and considerations that María Muñoz would like to put at the heart of her research and study proposal are related to fundamental aspects of choreographic composition and to a particular way of approaching creation, the fruit of long practical experience as a performer.

Retratos Errantes/Errant Portraits investigates how to emphasise the individuality of the creative worlds of each performer, with the attentive accompaniment of the company Mal Pelo. The interest in this encounter lies in showing how one group of creators/performers can offer multiple perspectives on each individual within the collective.

The piece revolves around the idea of the portrait. The idea of portraying themselves puts an intimate frame around each individual, revealing his or her singularity, and in this way reflects the sensitivity of the human condition.

LaBolsa are hoping to portray themselves, to be mirrors for each other so as to draw closer. With this mutual affection the collective builds resistance to the trends of social disintegration: portraiture as a form of praise, devoting time to contemplation of the other.

TERCERA EDICIÓN DEL DESEMBRENDANSA
EXHIBICIÓN-FORMACIÓN-CREACIÓN alrededor de la DANZA

La tercera edición del ciclo llamado "Diciembre en Danza" se llevará a cabo en Celrà del 29 de noviembre al 2 de diciembre. Aprovechando la larga trayectoria en formación y proyectos de creación que se han desarrollado en el municipio de Celrà desde los años 90, el Área de Cultura del Ayuntamiento de Celrà con la colaboración de la Escuela Municipal de Danza de Celrà y el animal en la espalda, organizan un tercer ciclo de danza, centrándose en la exhibición (en el Teatro del Ateneo de Celrà), la formación (a través de talleres en la Escuela de danza) y la creación ( abriendo al público procesos de creación de compañías residentes en el Animal a la Espalda).
La muestra tendrá lugar en diversas localizaciones del pueblo, concretamente en L'animal a la espalda (Mas Espolla), la plaza de la Iglesia, el Teatro El Ateneo de Celrà, el Pabellón de las Piscinas y en la Escuela Municipal de danza.
Esta propuesta de espectáculos se complementará con diferentes talleres, dirigidos a jóvenes a partir de 15 años y adultos, que realizarán algunos de los bailarines y creadores invitados. Estas sesiones se llevarán a cabo en la Escuela Municipal de Danza de Celrà y se trabajará el lenguaje artístico y el movimiento específico de cada creador / a.
La inauguración del ciclo "Diciembre en Danza" tendrá lugar el jueves 29 de diciembre a las 19 h, con la presentación del trabajo de residencia de creación de María García Vera (Cataluña) y Juan Pablo Miranda (Argentina), bajo el título 'Werner o el azul de los orígenes ', en el centro de creación el Animal en la Espalda (Mas Espolla de Celrà).
A partir del viernes y hasta el domingo por la tarde, se combinarán espectáculos y talleres.
En esta tercera edición participarán, entre otros, la bailarina, coreógrafa y performance inglesa Yael Karavan, la compañía francesa Les Chasseurs Cueilleurs, la compañía balear Cia. Baal Danza, y los catalanes Magí Serra, la Cía. Los Moñekos, la bailarina Ariadna Montfort y la Cía. La Mujer del Carnicero.

Werner o el azul de los orígenes es un homenaje escénico que se construye sobre citas, restos de guiones perdidos y testimonios que intentan reconstruir los últimos días de Werner Herzog. Es un homenaje, pero también es un funeral. Hay un desaparecido en escena y este desaparecido es el propio Werner.
Hay un cuerpo perdido y, hablando de este muerte, invocan metafóricamente la muerte de las imágenes del director, de aquellas imágenes "puras", del origen selvático y de las huellas de Werner por la selva, de su barco en el Amazonas, de aquel barco subiendo una montaña ... realidades imposibles de recuperar que ya sólo pueden ser citadas e imaginadas.
Esta pieza es la suspensión de un ritual de despedida que trata de provocar una conjura. Su función es restituir y mantener pura la potencia, lejos del infierno de este mundo en ruinas. Una celebración post mortem que reconcilia el eterno vínculo con la mirada del Padre.

Mal Pelo propone un tercer encuentro en este 2018 que tiene como punto de partida el trabajo de investigación que María Muñoz hizo por su solo Bach, pieza que ha tenido una acogida excepcional en todo el mundo. Un laboratorio que invita a poner en juego los universos de la danza y de la música contrapuntística de Johan Sebastian Bach. Un trabajo sobre la mirada precisa, sobre el gesto, y sobre la musicalidad de cada uno de los cuerpos en la exploración de este mundo único del compositor alemán.

El lenguaje escénico de Mal Pelo está en tránsito constante y se alimenta de la búsqueda personal y colectiva de los potenciales expresivos de cada una de las herramientas de que dispone: cuerpo, texto, audiovisual, iluminación, banda sonora y espacio escenográfico . En las creaciones de María Muñoz y Pep Ramis encontramos diferentes aproximaciones al lenguaje del movimiento y sus hibridaciones con otros lenguajes, pero siempre hay una centralidad específica del cuerpo y el movimiento de manera profunda y comprometida.

Sa Mateixa

La misma isla. La misma añada. La misma canción. La misma danza. La misma gente. La misma tonada. La misma familia. La misma silla. La misma persona. La misma melodía. La misma vez. La misma mujer. La misma voz. La misma casa. La misma foto. La misma madre. La misma fiesta. La misma imagen que se nos repite y que va tejiendo la geometría de nuestra memoria colectiva. Una memoria compleja, desigual. Una memoria sin tiempo, antigua y reciente vez. Una memoria que llama, que calla. Una memoria que fluctúa, que se va generando día a día. La misma imagen de unos hilos que nos unen sin que los podamos ver. Unos hilos muy poderosos: cuando alguien les toca nos hacen resonar generaciones eternas en las entrañas.

“Cuando llegué a la tierra del mundo, el mundo ya estaba con todas las cosas que llegaron a la tierra antes de que el hombre” Blai Bonet

Piero Steiner, Andrés Corchero, Pep Ramis and Enric Ases have known each other for a long time now. After their paths had crossed several times by chance on stage, they decided in the autumn of 2015 to form a serious association to share their particular ways of doing things, their views on theatre, movement and the world of performance. Different disciplines and languages put to the service of a desire for synthesis, engagement, momentum and discovery. Four men of the same age and height and with the same aim: to seek out new areas of expression and a shared language that would enable them to reach directly to the core of the spectator.

Ana Vallés and Mónica García met in 2000 in Madrid, during the creation process for Fine
Romance by Provisional Danza, on which Vallés was stage director. Ana is an actress and
director, Mónica a dancer and choreographer. Since 2007 they have worked together on
shows for Matarile Teatro.
During the creation process for Antes de la Metralla, Mónica suggested that they work
together on a duet and this was how the project Los limones, la nieve y todo lo demás/
Lemons, Snow and All the Rest came about.