The 37th edition of the annual Dansa València festival of national and international dance took place from 13–21 April 2024. Its subtitle, ‘Dulce rugir’ (‘sweet roaring’) suggests a feline murmur – whether purr or growl – as well as the low rumbling of thunder; either way, promising multiple experiences for the audience. I attended the last three days of the festival, which offered a full choreographic menu around the city’s singular venues.
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Purr, growl, rumble: Dansa València 2024
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Alice Ripoll, Zona Franca. Photo © José Jordan
‘Sweet roaring’ promised this year’s Dansa València festival of national and international dance
Ángela Verdugo, Mata baja. Debajo del sudor hay personas. Photo © José Jordan
Conversations with the surroundings
My festival tour begins with Mata baja. Debajo del sudor hay personas. (‘Undergrowth. Under the sweat there is people.’) where already entering the space our bodies are embraced by the soundscape of a wildly swelling sea, accompanied by a video projected in the backdrop. The audiovisuals, managed by three co-creators – physically present on both sides of the stage – already establish a collaborative situation, while a fourth figure, choreographer-performer Ángela Verdugo, verbalises their invitation to ‘share a form of gaze’. Moving through the space with interrupted gestures, she appears in a fuchsia costume that could be a glamorous Met Gala outfit or an augmented plastic medusa. In the piece’s anthropocene world, the scenes constantly zoom in on nature’s creatures, structures and processes, wanting to learn from their knowledge, as when a dancer’s vulnerable body becomes a branch, longing to absorb their movement through bare skin, or when beautifully lit leaves or bunches of moss are exposed like sculptures. As an ecological manifesto, the work combines an in-your-face critique of capitalism (‘so many pills to shut us up’) with a multisensorial experience of beauty in movement.
A similar experience of a respectful and learning dancing-body appears in Hacia un sol negro (‘Towards a black sun’), a solo by Joaquín Collado. Surrounded by the audience, seated on four sides of the performance space, Collado starts to cover and uncover his body with the clothing accessories waiting on the floor, but simultaneously fully aware of the 200 bodies around him. In this sensitively developing performance a slightly shabby peach-coloured cloth becomes a dress, grey sportpants fit perfectly onto the dancer’s arms, a tangled black cord together with a cap make a fashionable coiffure. The garments combine in myriad ways and reveal creatures that emerge from the dancer’s flesh, each one with a unique way to embody rhythm. Collado is in fact inspired by his experiences in ballroom dance championships, but during this gradually evolving performance I saw archetypes such as a burlesque performance of a commedia dell’arte Harlequin, or an incarnation of a hypermasculine caricature, ingeniously created with an oversized crotch that obstructs movement.
A third proposal of the weekend that reached towards a conversation between different spheres was the multiartistic Averno by Marcat Dance, a creation made for seven technically strong dancers including the choreographer himself, Mario Bermudez Gil. The visually stunning space is skilfully cut and drawn by the lights that intermingle with strongly expressive gestures, picturing Dante’s Inferno. Yet the rather traditional compositions and choreographic solutions left me longing for a braver approach to such a known referent.
The richness of flamenco
Flamenco occupies an important role in the festival, partly because of the director María José Mora’s specialisation in this style, and during this edition I could see two creators who approach flamenco from the perspective of contemporary creation.
Rocío Molina, la bailaora internationally known for her proposals that radically rework the aesthetics and technical features of flamenco, presented Vuelta a Uno – Fragmento de Trilogía sobre la guitarra (‘Turn at One – A Fragment of the Trilogy about the guitar’). This third chapter of her research on guitar, in this case establishing a beautifully intimate dialogue with the guitarist Yerai Cortés, develops in a space that evokes a fantasy of 1950s cinema through classic ribbon microphones or a Grease-style pink satin jacket. The elements cleverly reach beyond aesthetics when Molina uses turquoise bubblegum or Pop Rocks candy to generate rhythms for different flamenco styles, or when a platform at the back of the stage – reminding me of a New York rooftop – allows her to lie down and add movements on the floor such as lazy somersaults, and dramaturgically lower the rhythm before pushing up the energy with a virtuoso sequence of zapateo. Molina’s apparently innocent pastel coloured stage is filled with research and playful risk.
Yinka Esi Graves, The Disappearing Act. Photo © José Jordan
As the name indicates, Yinka Esi Graves’ The Disappearing Act plays with (dis)appearances, surfaces and performances that end up enriching flamenco from a strongly postcolonial perspective. From the first second, the piece promises a powerful distortion of the traditional flamenco codes as Raúl Cantizano plays the guitar lying horizontally like a xylophone, or the habitual flamenco cajón is replaced by the drums of Remi Graves. The music is crowned with the powerful presence of cantaora Rosa de Algeciras. Hiding behind a golden veil-wig that obscures her face, choreographer-dancer Graves begins the piece with an insistent yet somehow groovy movement that reminds me of the Arabic influence in flamenco. She gradually adds layers into the choreographic texture, but also turns our gaze around as the jumpsuit she’s wearing transforms into another costume, or we are offered a view of her action from the ceiling, through a camera that reveals her drawing a map on the floor.
The diasporic presence subtly gains complexity in front of our eyes, until we arrive at a brilliant scene where the musicians talk about Ghana being invaded by the Danish, the Portuguese, the English, while assisting Graves in a makeup tutorial – in three languages – as we witness her body intervened by instruments of beauty: concealer, lipstick, eyelash extensions. The action blends with a decolonising discourse in cabaret-toned scene preparing her as flamenca for a virtuoso fragment with precise rhythm-work, where she constantly enriches and alters the language of flamenco with a versatile use of torso and back that distorts the movement. The piece’s subtle, subversive power is hidden in an intelligent use of the elements and the performers’ genuine collaboration that leave me slightly sobbing inside.
Playfulness and (serious) party
I was looking forward to the Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll with her company Suave, currently touring numerous festivals and theatres in Europe – and that turned out to be another high-point of the festival. In Zona Franca, a title referring to areas of freedom but also a state of chaos, even prostitution, we witness one hour of visual and bodily fireworks developed around urban dances such as passinho, a dance that mixes funk and breakdance with Brazilian rhythms and influences. The piece consists of scenes made of movement and action, like bubbles that float through the space simultaneously or separately, such as a fleshy male duet of naked upper bodies grabbing each other with ambivalent gestures of fight and pleasure, or a woman in fullsplits on a table making a rhythm with her buttocks. At any moment, these scenes explode in virtuous polyrhythmic movement, the trembling flesh of the dancers capable of isolating any part of their body.
Big black balloons hang from the ceiling, covering the stage with certain danger but also working as a timepiece that reveals the work’s progress. Each time a dancer bursts a balloon, the bodies are covered with falling confetti or smoke-like brown dust that alters the action: intense solo dancing becomes a solitary party, or the bodies literally lose identity as faces are covered with colourful pigments. Ripoll brilliantly plays with changing the action’s tone, showing the sadness of an endless party, distilling something of the Brazilian milieu during the mandate of Bolsonaro that gave rise to this piece.
Caribe Mix’23, Mar Garcia & Javi Soler. Photo © José Jordan
Partying is also the strategy of Caribe Mix’23 by Valencian choreographer Mar Garcia and musician Javi Soler deliciously fusing elements of differents artfields, as in their previous work on Velázquez, presented in Dansa València in 2023. Now showing the stage as a film set and seating the audience in the spot of the camera, we spy a wannabe popstar and her backup dancers-singers shooting a music video. Maybe with a wink to the Hollywood backstage musicals that drew from the exoticism of a making-of story, we see dancers rehearsing, endless takes of a tiny choreographic phrase, changes of costume and, finally, performances of entire hits-to-be, specially composed for the performance. The postmodern repetitions of highly precise patterns that deconstruct minimalist step-touch choreographies, wearing silver pants, while the dancers exaggeratedly playback into microphones, reveal a complex capitalist machinery where each body has a function. Entertaining as well as slightly upsetting. While some darkness would be welcome to enhance the piece’s critical eye, the audience did end up singing the work’s catchy tunes, even outside the theatre after the performance.
Cornucopia and closure
This year the festival’s closure was given to (LA)HORDE, a multiartistic collective responsible for directing the National Ballet of Marseille since 2019. Taking the form of a gala, composed by six short repertories that made an impact on the company, the event somehow echoes the exhibition and competition of balletic tradition. I first experienced an exciting candy pick-and-mix, that towards the end of a 2-hour performance begans to blur into an excess of stimulus. Still, it’s rewarding to witness the company’s corporeal capacities to embody the multiplicity of languages, from the tidiness of Lucinda Child’s Concerto from 1993, danced with relaxed lightness and attention to detail, to Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud’s Grime Ballet (Danser parce que qu’on ne peut pas parler aux animaux) that defies the codes of classical ballet with electronic grime music, achieving to merge, for example, queer point-shoe work with a deliciously composed rupture of classical lines.
Oona Doherty’s Lazarus brings a working-class body to the stage of Valencia’s Teatro Principal, a mid-19th century building clad with red velvet and gold leaf. A character originally created for the choreographer’s solo performance, now skilfully multiplied into a stageful of dancers in unison, brilliantly understands the scratching of balls or defiant walking and staring as choreography, elevating these gestures with the celestial choral singing of a 17th-century miserere. Another sacred experience is Oiwa by Franck Chartier (Peeping Tom), an incarnation of the well-known homonymous Japanese 19th-century phantasmagoria on betrayal and revenge. Staged through a series of duets, the beautifully lit naked limbs and torsos intertwine through extremely difficult partnering, simultaneously floating in smoke that manages to confuse us with a perception of a disappearing floor.
This veritable staging of a cornucopia concludes a festival somehow able to satisfy a variety of audiences, from a more traditional dance spectatorship on big stages to choreographies of rebellious experimentation, into the several dance events happening during the festival in public spaces such as parks, squares and museums that stimulate more spontaneous encounters with dance.
Beyond the dance programme, the professionals visiting the festival from abroad were also rewarded by a route through three Valencian creation spaces. The independent workspaces Pluto and El consulado are situated in an area that is half garden and half abandoned industrial buildings. They share a strong vision on community and collaboration and embrace creation on arts beyond styles or mediums. Additionally, the government run dance-space Espai LaGranja hosts several dance organisations and offers, amongst other things, residencies and completely free regular training for dance professionals. The visits gave an immense value to these initiatives that sustain the often highly precarious dance field by generating vital communities. Dansa València leaves me with a sense of of hope and serenity, but as I leave the city I am also highly aware of the lack of sustainable funding structures – a condition that imposes its own limits on creation – and of the rising rumble of right-wing politics, eager to influence the arts. ●
València, Spain
