The choreographer returns to Madrid, She’s mine, the piece that launched his career in France, transgressing genres and injecting humour in the dance
“Back is always strange. Back to the roots makes that one has opposite feelings. It is like the relationship with family: there are always things that are pleasant and others which are less”. Marta Izquierdo Muñoz dancer and choreographer, has spent several years without showing his work in Madrid, his hometown. Now is back to present on Ships Slaughterhouse (from 12 to 15 December), two mounts fundamental in his career. On the one hand, the first production that Left developed with his own company, [lodudo], premiered at the Festival d’avignon in 2008: She’s mine. On the other, one of his latest works, Practice makes perfect, a creation on the border francoespañola.
Between both projects, runs a race risky in the humor, pop culture, androgyny and the exploration of the margins have their role to play.
Exiled voluntary in France since 2001, the date on which he joined the Choreographic Centre of Rennes and Brittany, and with stable company in Toulouse, has been in this country where the choreographer has developed the bulk of their production. “I left Spain because I wanted more, I wanted to investigate. I was afraid of locking myself into a spiral of creation that you always do the same things, that is what happens when you don’t question your work, nor will you make the questions necessary. I went to really know how to do that and find support to do so.”
The breath came in 2008 at the festival, created by Jean Vilar. The criticism is surrendered to the charms of the protagonist of She’s mine, a performer, marginal and inadequate, as a being of Jean Genet or Almodovar, and the resonating echoes of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Sarah Bernhard, of Divine and of the pop stars manufactured.
With all security, the spectator react to that humor and a taste for the kitsch that often have jobs Left. “The mood in the contemporary dance is something that is not very exploited and yes, frowned upon. But my way of speaking has to do with the creation of characters that move between tragedy and comedy, on the edge of laughter and disaster. In regards to kitsch, it also contains beauty, for me there is in what is considered ugly or awful; and so is shown in my work.”
The interest that Marta Left is for fine lines-whether it is between the theatre and the dance, or between what is understood as evil and good taste – is transformed in Practice makes perfect, the second of the pieces to be presented in Madrid, in a profound reflection on the natural border are the Pyrenees, “no man’s land” marked by displacement, tragic as that of the exiled republicans. “The idea was born to be crossing the border constantly and understand that you don’t have anything to do one side and the other. I want to question that separation and see what imagination produces, as I wonder about how contemporary dance can be through the traditional dance. There is always an attempt to cross the established”.
Far is left to the improvisation of the early days. “Before I needed more freedom, but now the more limits I put on, the better. I need to decide when to cross them”. On this occasion, writing, choreography is accompanied on the scene of a folk group in catalonia and the stick becomes a symbol for articulation from the speech: “the suit of The struggle of the peasants spaniards in the paintings of Goya, the stick of the tamers of bears of Ariège, the stick of the passer to go through the mountain, a stick as symbol phallic…”.
This same element is repeated in his most recent creation, Imago-go, that we will not see for the moment, and that focuses on the figure of the commercial, exploring the ambiguity of this popular female character. “I come back to popular culture and there is no figure more pop than a cheerleader. In France it was an image very powerful in the decades of the 70’s and 80’s but today it is an image quite marginal; in contrast, in the united States is coming back with force between the queer communities and african-american”. Another wonder.
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