La Phármaco

Critic’s Eye Prize for Dance 2015

Award for Best Female Dancer 2015 in Premios Lorca

Finalist for Best Female Dancer in Premios Max 2017

Injuve 2009

La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea
La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea
The dance I am seeking uncovers historical wounds. It resists the fallacy of truth and explores the dictates imposed by neoliberalism which, as per the worst dictatorships, has the quality of presenting itself as the only possible system, of brushing away the past and rejecting any future which does not resemble and replicate it. Neoliberalism is the perfect fiction, an impeccable application of the Aristotelian concept of verisimilitude. The dance I am seeking uncovers historical wounds and actively resists fiction and its verisimilitude.
 
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The dance I am seeking rejects the notion of the body as housing the individual, the anecdotal, the romantic. It re-vindicates its capacity to embody a collective voice and messages that pertain to us as a species. The collective body overrides the current body and celebrates what all of them have lived, even if they are no longer with us.

 

The dance I am seeking belongs to folklore: it is the wildest and most profound of bodies. Independent of the fashions and the dictatorship of the present, it is capable of applying a critical physicality to history. I am uninterested in folklore as a finished product, stylised, schematic. Folklore opens like a wound in our bodies whenever we dance. It’s dynamic, it’s alive. It transforms into ourselves, it is us. 
 

 

I am not seeking a body imbued with verisimilitude, but one that is real. A body vehemently exposed to its fleetingness, which offers itself like flowers to the silence of cemeteries.

 

 

Luz Arcas
La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea
La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea
Luz Arcas formed The Pharmakos Company in 2009. Her prizes include: the Critics’s Eye 2015 Prize for Dance; the 2015 Lorca Best Female Dance Performance; Runner-Up for the Best Female Dance Performance at the 2015 Max Theatre Awards; the 2009 Injuve Prize; the 2009 Malaga Creates Prize.   

 

 

 

Creative highlights include: Kaspar Hauser: Europe’s Orphan (Canal Theatres, Autumn to Spring Festival, 2016); Misere. When Night Comes, They Will Cover Themselves with Her (Canal Thatres, 2017); A Great Political Emotion (2018, Valle-Inclán Theatre Madrid, co-production with the National Dramatic Centre), The Most Beautiful Children (2018, co-production between the Víctor Ullate Ballet and the Greater Madrid Council), Dolorosa/Our Lady of Sorrows (2019, created for The National Theatre of El Salvador) and the new Project, Berkisten/Christians, a trilogy whose first instalment, Domestication, was released in Madrid’s Canal Theatres last November.

 

 

She also explores non-theatrical spaces such as in The Chacona Dance (2015, Pompidou Centre), Embodying what was Hidden (2016, King Juan Carlos Centre, University of New York), The Wanderer (2018, Conde Duque, Garden State) o Room with my Soul Outside (2019, Picasso Museum, Bruce Nauman Exhibition).     

 

 

The Pharmakos has carried out other kinds of artistic and pedagogical projects such as World and Language (2016, Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, You Who Have the Light, at the National School of Dance in New Delhi (2016).

 

Her repertory has toured different companies, accompanied by educational programmes in Europe, Africa, America and Asia. 

 

 

Her work has received support from the Canal Dance Theatre Company; The Greater Madrid Council; the National Dance Company; the Andalusian Agency of Cultural Institutions; the National Institute of Stage Arts and Music; the Ministry of Culture, Education and Sport; Madrid City Council; the General Society of Spanish Authors; the Cervantes Institute; the Spanish Agency for Development of International Co-operation.