It is one of the shows that closes this 39th Madrid Autumn Festival in the Sala Negra of the Teatros del Canal. It is directed by Pablo Messiez, who has also done the dramaturgy and created the choreography together with Lucas Condró, Claudia Faci, Poliana Lima and José Juan Rodríguez.
Between all of them they have raised ‘Corps de baile’, the second incursion -at least that we know-, of the Argentine playwright and director in the world of dance. The first was his celebrated The Songs.
In ‘Corps de baile’ the body and the space dialogue in constant and mutual interaction, perhaps as the most primitive form of theater, that place in which the assembly (the public) gathers around a proposal that is generally full of ideas, of words, of fables that together convey an emotion, a reflection, a shudder. All this can also be done without words, or almost without them … The bodies and souls of four splendid dancers and actors are enough: Poliana Lima, Claudia Faci, Lucas Condró and José Juan Rodríguez.
If the body as an essential sign of existence has been the axis on which this 39th Autumn Festival of the Community of Madrid has run, nothing better to close it during this weekend than ‘Dance Body’. A space, a defined place where the heterogeneous reigns, what does not have a name or cannot be named, multiculturalism (the few words of the montage are emitted in Portuguese, French and Spanish), and poetry, poetry in movement and in abundance during the 90 minute duration of the show.
The montage was already in Messiez’s head at the beginning of last year, but, according to his own confession, it was conceived in the first months of confinement of the epidemic. The Argentine already imagined interrelated bodies, moved by the same rhythm and the same melody but which cannot be touched because they cannot be touched, perhaps as a consequence of the happy pandemic virus. Everything is dead, but, at the same time, everything is movement.
In ‘Corps de baile’, although other pieces are also included, it arises basically from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, with which the four actors and dancers are intimately related, together and separately. The proposal is divided into five parts (Air, Songs, What vibrates, The tongue and The song of gratitude) that seem to arise from the impulse, from the intimate and extreme need to trace them in the air so that they also together –space and bodies- , take on a new meaning.
On one side of the stage, only a ballet barre and on the opposite side, a painting, L’etoile, by Degas, are the only elements that break the emptiness of the room. A room that also helps the sound design of Oscar G. Villegas, and the lighting of Paloma Parra.
The journey that the artists in ‘Corps de baile’ propose to the spectator goes from the word to the body, in a common search for the essential in the scene. And what is essential is more than the word, it is the body, the skin through which most of the human sensations enter. The result is truly beautiful, shocking, and poetic.
‘Dance body’
Dramaturgy and direction: Pablo Messiez
Assistant director: Javier L. Patiño
Choreographies: Lucas Condró, Claudia Faci, Poliana Lima, Pablo Messiez and José Juan Rodríguez
Performers: Lucas Condró, Claudia Faci, Poliana Lima and José Juan Rodríguez
Sound design: Óscar G. Villegas
Lighting design: Paloma Parra
Technical direction: Paloma Parra
39th Madrid Autumn Festival
Canal Theaters, Madrid
November 26, 27 and 28, 2021
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