Never talk about what you don’t care about, otherwise you will hear things you don’t like.

A thousand and one nights

It all began in 2015 in Malabo, capital of Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony devastated by imperialism, where I went to develop a dance project. BEKRISTEN, which means ‘Christians’ in the Fang language, was born out of a strong spiritual, personal crisis, but also of our time. Human evolution, understood from the perspective of techno-economic prosperity, leaves us in the midst of a strange landscape, intoxicated by consumption and waste, tyrannised by the dictatorship of happiness and eternal youth, where the idea of neighbour fades into that of user. In this hyper-connected global world, how can we love today, what can we do in the face of the pain of others?

As in the triptychs of Bosch, Brueghel, Van der Wayden or Bacon, I try to paint stages, milestones or transits of the human soul: La domesticación, Somos la guerra, La buena obra or, as Bataille would say: eroticism, work and death.

La domesticación premiered in 2019, co-produced by Teatros del Canal in Madrid. Somos la guerra premiered in 2021, co-produced by the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Conde Duque. The complete triptych, with the first two chapters revisited and the third, La buena obra, premiered at the Autumn Festival in Madrid, at Teatros del Canal, and has the support of the Teatro Central in Seville and the Graner Centre de Creació in Barcelona.

The last time I visited my grandmother Luz, whose name my mother and I inherited, at the old people’s home, I thought: there is nothing more frightening than bodies that smell of death. I thought about the obsolescence of bodies. Of waste bodies. In the old people’s home as a clean point spot for technological objects, a dumping ground for what doesn’t fit in the world and that we patiently wait for time to make it disappear.

DIRECCIÓN ARTÍSTICA (COREOGRAFÍA, DRAMATURGIA, ESPACIO Y VESTUARIO)

Luz Arcas

BAILE

Jesús Bravo, Carmen Gil, Begoña Hernández, Isabel Lag, Luz López, Javier Páez, Ángeles de Paz y Lauracharlie 

ILUMINACIÓN

Jorge Colomer

MIRADA EXTERNA

Victoria Aimé y Rafel SM Paniagua

SONIDO

Pablo Contreras

FOTOGRAFÍA

Virginia Rota

PRODUCCIÓN

Alex Foulkes y Alberto Núñez

PRODUCCIÓN EJECUTIVA

Fernando Jariego

“An absolutely overwhelming corporal and political discourse that Arcas has been working on for more than a decade and that shakes with the violence of the unabashed truth.”

The goat has multiple roles to play in rural Spain. There is also a venerable tradition of the animal being brought to town by itinerant gypsy performers. Crowds would gather as news spread that the “goat number” was to be staged. With musical accompaniment, a human performer instructed the compliant animal to climb steps and perform atop a precarious raised platform. To this day, “to do the goat number” is a euphemism to express that someone is about to embark on a challenging task. In this new flamenco-infused production, Luz Arcas’s Pharmakos Company (Spain) pays homage to and reimagines this popular entertainment rite.   

Mariana is the name given to the goat who accompanies the wandering gypsy, the one who provides the show, who dances and puts food on the table. Mariana is the mule used for trilling by the peasant farmer, the female ass worked to death as well as the little donkey that carries our Lord. Irrespective of the age in which we live, the female animal is invariably the workhorse. In this production, song animates and encourages the forces of production; whilst the body freely recreates the potency of the animal that allows itself to be led by the rhythm of its organs, just like in an unadorned acapella flamenco song. It is moved not by some archaic essence but instead by a pure desire to hit upon the perfect form, to embody order and eloquence. As we speak of the deep song in flamenco, there is also a deep body in dance. The deep body radiates energy, life and death. Herein lies its radical and archaic modernity. The deep body breaks into dance much in the same way as we are brought to tears, sweat or burst out laughing. The languages are impure, a hybrid as is all that is genuinely alive. A dance sculpted in stone and clay, schematic, coarse and precise much like alters, amulets or tools. A dance as abstract and symbolic as it is utilitarian and material. 

The deep body has no formal objective, it has no objective.

The deep body has a coarse primitive and problematic imaginary.

The deep body is rooted:

its roots are mobile, there is nowhere it does not reach.

It is impure, hybrid,

it feels like its life is small and this only makes it grander.

The deep body is not Apollonian,

it gives rise to ritual and catharsis.

The deep body is theatre.

The deep body is carved like a primitive sculpture,

it has a secret faith in its own potency.

The possibility of death is its ultimate attribution,

it has fear, 

which it suffers

but, first and foremost,

said fear is danced (away).      

BAILE

Luz Arcas

VOZ

Bonela Hijo

PERCUSIONES Y SINTETIZADOR

Carlos González

CORNETA

Abraham Romero

GUITARRA

Bonela Chico

PALMAS Y ZAPATEADOS

Carmen Ríos

DIRECCIÓN ARTÍSTICA, COREOGRAFÍA Y ESPACIO ESCÉNICO

Luz Arcas

ACOMPAÑAMIENTO DRAMATÚRGICO

Rafael Sánchez Mateo Paniagua

ASISTENCIA ESCÉNICA Y MUSICAL

Abraham Gragera

ASISTENCIA ARTÍSTICA Y VESTUARIO

Ernesto Artillo

ASESORA DE FLAMENCO

Charo Martín

ILUMINACIÓN

Jorge Colomer

ESPACIO SONORO

Pablo Contreras

DIRECCIÓN TÉCNICA

Cristina Bolívar

TÉCNICOS EN GIRA

José Espigares y Pablo Contreras

FOTOGRAFÍA Y VIDEO

Virginia Rota, Alejandra Amere y Jorge Colomer

DISEÑO GRÁFICO

María Peinado

PRODUCCIÓN

Alberto Núñez y Alex Foulkes

PRODUCCIÓN EJECUTIVA

Fernando Jariego

“Mariana es la decantación de un baile, la madurez de una bailarina, Mariana es un puerto conquistado.”

“En abril llega una maravilla a los Teatros del Canal de ya una veterana coreógrafa, Luz Arcas, que estrenó en la Bienal de Flamenco de Sevilla, Mariana, puro folk convertido en contemporaneidad.”

Never talk about what you don’t care about, otherwise you will hear things you don’t like.

A thousand and one nights

It all began in 2015 in Malabo, capital of Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony devastated by imperialism, where I went to develop a dance project. BEKRISTEN, which means ‘Christians’ in the Fang language, was born out of a strong spiritual, personal crisis, but also of our time. Human evolution, understood from the perspective of techno-economic prosperity, leaves us in the midst of a strange landscape, intoxicated by consumption and waste, tyrannised by the dictatorship of happiness and eternal youth, where the idea of neighbour fades into that of user. In this hyper-connected global world, how can we love today, what can we do in the face of the pain of others?

As in the triptychs of Bosch, Brueghel, Van der Wayden or Bacon, I try to paint stages, milestones or transits of the human soul: La domesticación, Somos la guerra, La buena obra or, as Bataille would say: eroticism, work and death.

La domesticación premiered in 2019, co-produced by Teatros del Canal in Madrid. Somos la guerra premiered in 2021, co-produced by the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Conde Duque. The complete triptych, with the first two chapters revisited and the third, La buena obra, premiered at the Autumn Festival in Madrid, at Teatros del Canal, and has the support of the Teatro Central in Seville and the Graner Centre de Creació in Barcelona.

The central painting of the triptych is an apocryphal and fragmentary gospel, like that of Mary Magdalene. A broken work, like the waters that announce childbirth, like the first words of the world, immediately wet with tears and sweat. War is always anonymous, domestic and everyday. The war of labour, the violence of childbirth, of crying. Life as Calvary. Whoever works, stops or prays, lives in the hope of the prosperity that will come: riches, offspring, salvation… to create, to raise, to believe. 

DIRECCIÓN ARTÍSTICA (COREOGRAFÍA, DRAMATURGIA, ESPACIO Y VESTUARIO)

Luz Arcas

BAILE

Luz Arcas, Danielle Mesquita, La Merce, Javiera Paz, Galina Rodríguez y Raquel Sánchez

MÚSICA

Sole Le Parody

ILUMINACIÓN

Jorge Colomer

MIRADA EXTERNA

Victoria Aimé y Rafel SM Paniagua

SONIDO

Pablo Contreras

FOTOGRAFÍA

Virginia Rota

PRODUCCIÓN

Alex Foulkes and Alberto Núñez

PRODUCCIÓN EJECUTIVA

Fernando Jariego

“An absolutely overwhelming corporal and political discourse that Arcas has been working on for more than a decade and that shakes with the violence of the unabashed truth.”

Toná emerged in the course of the various trips to Malaga that I made to visit my rather ill father. In his home, where I was raised, there was a reencounter with references, icons, symbols that I had almost completely forgotten. I recalled anecdotes and fears, reconnecting with the folklore of my childhood. I wanted to dance a feeling true to that folklore: death as a celebration of life, the “fiesta”, and a catharsis that is both individual and collective.

I was working on a new project at the time with musician Luz Prado and visual artist Virginia Rota. I suggested to these two women, also from Malaga, that we explore this common poetic patrimony. Luz had worked extensively on the “verdiales”, a folk musical and dance tradition typical of Malaga that predates flamenco and can be traced back to pre-Roman times. The “verdiales” probably originated in Phoenician times and have, to a large extent, resisted successive cultural appropriations and all attempts at domestication. Virginia, for her part, had just opened an exhibition about mourning in Andalusia.

Collective memory and popular imaginaries are vital because they give us shelter from the storm, providing refuge from individualism, inviting us to forge a common shared narrative. As with anything related to the “people”, this cultural memory is undoubtedly problematic at multiple levels. But returning to revitalise said memory by dirtying and renaming it is an act of liberty that the collective can alone administer through performativity in defiance of cultural totalitarianism or any neoliberal attempt to fix or capture meaning. It is also a an act of resistance against the attempt by our system to bury and deny illness, old-age and death, which serves only to make us weak both culturally and spiritually, thereby rendering us as passive docile subjects.

Amongst my father´s book collection, I rediscovered a biography of Trinidad Huertas, “La Cuenca”, an early nineteenth-century dancer from Malaga who gained worldwide fame for a routine in which she performed as a female bullfighter, caught in the midst of the action, that earned her the epithet, “The Brave Woman”.

I have recuperated other references from my childhood such as the figure of Our Lady of Mount Carmel hoisted aloft in the procession by the sea on July 16 every year. As with so many other festivities belonging to the realm of the popular, it exudes a Pagan archaism that pre-dates Catholicism. The Church, however, has always exploited them to construct its own myths. I can still recall when a friend of my father’s took us at night to wait for the virgin to appear amidst the olive trees. I am interested in the experience of the miracle as construed by Pasolini or Ana Mendieta: the metaphysics of the flesh, a wanting manifestation of the spectacular, the unexpected witness.

Miracles are comprised of many things but, first and foremost, the need for them to take place. Their devotional character does not require too elaborate a formal structure. As my friend Rafael S.M. Paniagua says: “the efficiency of popular cultural forms is of another kind. The precision is of another kind. We can elaborate a belief on the basis of an abject image, a stain on the wall, a badly painted Christ. Popular devotion arranges itself around bad images.”

I confess that the process of creation has been a liberation. One can but hope that it will be for the audience as well.

Toná is born from the need to embody a broad identity, that does not strive to have its essence defined, linked organically to collective memory and popular imaginaries with all the conflicts that entails. A poetry that transmits flesh, the vital pulse, full of rage and joy, as well as of prejudices and superstitions. An ancestral and fertile pain that, from childhood onwards, gradually makes us what we are.

An identity as luminous as it is dark, which cannot be reduced to the metrics of productivity and consumption, a physical outpouring that refuses to be inscribed by the inertia of opinion and its euphoria, posing, protocol.

 A body reconciled with its vital forces, interwoven with illness, old age, death and that brazenly embroils itself with symbols so that they may be sullied, trod upon, renamed, whilst shouting: they are ours, they belong to us.

A body that doesn’t choose between believing and suspecting: faith and nihilism as brothers in arms, repeating to each other that loving is to have the keys to heaven and realise that heaven is empty.

“Shame is the feeling that shall save Humanity.” It won’t be love, but rather shame.

 A pain that is ancient and fertile: flesh, bodies. Identity is the mystery that hides in every body and emerges from the intimate reconciliation with shame.

 I look for dance in bodies, its folklore, its wound, not the virtuous dance of trained bodies, but dance— human dignity summoning us, daring to stamp the floor with the force of shame. The most beautiful anger, the most open wound.

DIRECTOR, DRAMATURGY, PERFORMER, & CHOREOGRAPHY

Luz Arcas

SCENIC AND CHOREOGRAPHY ASSISTANT

Abraham Gragera

DRAMATURGY ASSISTANT

Rafael SM Paniagua

MUSIC DIRECTION AND COMPOSITION

Luz Prado

ARTISTIC ASSISTANT

Nino Laisné

DANCE

Luz Arcas

VIOLIN & ELECTRONIC

Luz Prado

VOICE, CLAPS & PERCUSSION

Lola Dolores

CUSTOME DEIGN

Carmen 17

FLAG DESIGN

Isa Soto

MAESTRA DE BANDERA

Paula “La Albardonera”

SCENOGRAPHIC ASSISTANT

José Manuel Chávez

DISEÑO Y CONFECCIÓN DE LAZOS Y FLORES

Elena González-Aurioles

PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO

Virginia Rota

SOUND DESIGN

Pablo Contreras

LIGHTING DESIGN

Jorge Colomer

EXECUTIVE PRODUCTION

Fernando Jariego

PRODUCTION DESIGN AND COORDINATION

Alex Foulkes and Alberto Núñez

TOUR MANAGER

Andrea Méndez Criado (Spectare)

GRAPHIC DESIGN

María Peinado

COMMUNITY MANAGER

Carlos González

“la búsqueda de un nuevo lenguaje , capaz de amalgamar danza contemporánea y flamenco, la búsqueda virtuosa de una bailarina y coreógrafa que habla con cada fragmento de su cuerpo y que nos sorprende con los simbolismos sacados del mundo taurino y de las fiestas españolas”

 “de hecho se podría concebir un espectáculo sólo con el movimiento de los pies de Luz Arcas , que son el núcleo, el quid y la espina dorsal de su partitura física , de sus danzas atávicas, de su estar en escenario”

“Una hora de pura energía y catarsis en la que la artista baila la muerte incorporándola en una atmósfera folclórica”

“La coreógrafa -a veces con tintes preciosamente gamberros- llena de otro fervor el escenario. Una vuelta a su infancia hoy reinterpretada que llena de festividad y del propio espíritu del folclore. Ella habla de la muerte con respeto porque respeta el miedo antiguo, pero aquí Arcas la celebra. Está celebrando la muerte. Celebra el folclore de la muerte como celebra la vida, porque ella es la celebración de lo negro, de la muerte, del llanto, de la virgen. Ella es otra virgen. La campesina con sentido de comunidad. La mujer tribal. La niña fotogénica del pueblo indígena que deshoja nuestras máscaras de cemento y de alquitrán varado.

Con sombrero negro que me lleva a los verdiales y colores en el tinte negro de unos paños que engalanan, Luz se apropia del concepto de lo sacro y lo convierte en otra cosa que fusiona al ser humano y a Dios mezclando la cultura popular, los ritos y las creencias primitivas. Arcas, la santera de sangre, pelo y fuego se fusiona con la naturaleza primera, con la vivo y lo no vivo, adquiriendo multitud de formas en su evolución y partiendo de la fuerza de su cuerpo extenuado. Su cuerpo, que es su territorio, está lleno de respuestas”

Treno was born of a poetic image: the first rhythm comes from a first cry, from a first lament, from the first elegy. Treno is a meeting where what is invisible is celebrated, where we sing to the darkness. A modern recreation of an imaginary folklore: a pagan homage to the constantly savage order of things.

In Treno the body and the music are the respiration evoking the world’s rhythm in a ceremony that consecrates its own core, its own bonds.

DIRECTION AND DRAMATURGY

Luz Arcas and Abraham Gragera

CHOREOGRAPHY AND INTERPRETATION

Luz Arcas

SOPRANO SAXO

Mariano Peyrou

PERCUSSION

Xosé Saqués

PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO

Javier Suárez

In Chacona five bodies come together around the same melody. Five body-variations, like mechanical voices looking to find each other, constructing alliances in time’s common melody.

The chaconne is a baroque dance originating in Spain which spread throughout Europe in the XVI and XVII centuries. Many composers posed chaconnes in this time. Perhaps the most emblematic is J. S. Bach, that Sofia Gubaidulina paid tribute to in the XX century with her work Chaconne, which accompanies and gives the name to our piece.

DIRECTION AND CHOREOGRAPHY

Luz Arcas

DANCE

Elena González-Aurioles, Amanda Marinas, Nadia Vigueras, Esther Ramos Albiol, Nathalie Remadi.

MUSIC

Chaconne, Sofía Guibadulina

MUSIC INTERPRETATION

Carlos González

In Malabo (the capital of Guinea Equatorial) there are neither official music schools nor dances ones. Nevertheless, dance is an essential part of the life of young people; the heart around which social relationships are articulated.

Knowledge is transmitted from one to another, and gathers elements that come from the tribal dances performed by each of the ethnic groups; knowledge learnt within the families, and merged with the enormous Afro-American influence that, brought by TV or Internet, permeates the whole of Guinea’s culture.

After two months’ work in the ‘Centro Cultural de España’ in Malabo, La Phármaco brings together three dancers in order to erode all of their influences and styles, so it just remains Abok, or ‘dance’ in the Fang language, the ethnicity to which the majority of the dancers belong.

In this rite, the physical expression of La Phármaco lives together with Equatorial Guinean tribal dances, the rhythms of African traditional drums and baroque western music pieces.

A rite where those who live remember, physically, those who are not here any longer; and yet they stay with us, dancing like a shadow through our bodies.

*Abok is dedicated in memory of Pedro Luis Nba Mitsunu, one of the dancers who used to be part of our cast, and who passed away, victim of a shipwreck, in August 2016.

DIRECTION AND DRAMATURGY

Luz Arcas and Abraham Gragera

CHOREOGRAPHY

Luz Arcas

DANCERS

Neftalí Castaño Gerona, Miguel Faustino Obiang Asumu, José Manuel Ondó Mangué

PIANO

Carlos González

VOICE

Laura Fernández Alcalde

LIGHTING

Jorge Colomer

PHOTOGRAPGY

Jorge Colomer and Enrique Escorza

COLLABORATE

CCEM, FIIAPP and AECID

Embodying what was hidden is a dance – manifest: the scenic body summons us to take part in a collective ceremony that re-updates the power of the dance as a backbone of the community, of the folklore, the holiday, stripped of any religious or political filiation, but with all his intact aptitude to show what is hidden, undefinable and tragic of human condition.
.

DIRECTION AND DRAMATURGY

Luz Arcas and Abraham Gragera

CHOREOGRAPHY AND INTERPRETATION

Luz Arcas

COMPOSITION AND MUSICAL INTERPRETATION

Carlos González

LIGHTING DESIGN

Jorge Colomer

CUSTOM DESIGN

Heridadegato

PHOTOGRAPGY

Virginia Rota

COLLABORATE

Centro de Danza Canal and Inaem

The Errancy (A Mirror in which we see ourselves) is a short work which can be performed in conventional as well as unconventional spaces, performed by three dancers with live music played by a trio of percussion, voice, and violin.

The work brings together archetypes of our stories, fables and songs, like Niña Trampa, Tía Miseria, or Mariceniza, accompanied by original compositions also inspired by our folklore.

With this work we investigate concepts like the straying from ones path, the feminine figure in the oral tradition and in the amoral and savage story of humanity: folklore as resistance to the domesticfication of the civilized world. The counter history, one that is sung rather than written.

DIRECTION AND DRAMATURGY

Luz Arcas and Abraham Gragera

CHOREOGRAPHY

Luz Arcas

DANCE

Luz Arcas, Paula Montoya and Raquel Sánchez

COMPOSITION AND MUSICAL DIRECTION

Abraham Gragera and Carlos González

BRASS AND VOICE

Cristian Buades

PIANO AND PERCUSSION

Carlos González

VIOLIN

David Santacecilia

LIGHTING

Jorge Colomer

PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO

Virginia Rota

CUSTOM DESIGN

Heridadegato

DISEÑO GRÁFICO

María Peinado

PRODUCTION

Centro Danza Canal, Junta de Andalucía and Inaem

Interpretationn: Luz Arcas, Begoña Quiñones, Ignacio Jiménez and Juan Manuel Ramírez  Composition and  music interpretation: Carlos González  Choreography: Luz Arcas  Iluminación: Miguel Ángel Camacho  Custom Design: Tenkey and Ana Montes  Photography: Javier Suárez and Eva Viera  Video: Javier Suárez  Graphic design: María Peinado  Director and Dramaturgy: Luz Arcas and Abraham Gragera.

Dance: Luz Arcas, Regina Navarro and Ana Catalina Román  Interpretation and musical composition:  Laura Fernández, Voz, Corifeo Mariano Peyrou, brass and Xosé Saqués, percussion  Choreography: Luz Arcas  Lighting:  Jorge Colomer  Custom Design:  Rosa López  Fotography: Javier Suárez  Graphic design: María Peinado  Dramaturgy and Scenic Direction: Luz Arcas and Abraham Gragera

Interpretation and Choreography: Luz Arcas  Voice: Laura Fernández and Rosa Miranda  Lighting: Jorge Colomer  Fotography: Celia Mondéjar and Raúl Barrio  Graphic design: María Peinado  Dramaturgy  and Scenic Direction: Luz Arcas and Abraham Gragera

Interpretation and Choreography: Luz Arcas and Koke Armero  Sound Space: Illo Muriel  Music Interpretation : Manuel Casas, theorbo, Rosa Miranda, voice  and Illo Muriel, viola da gamba Original Music: Henry Purcell  Lighting: Diego Domínguez and María Otero  Custom Design and Scenic Space : La Phármaco  Custom: Eva Arinero  Scenography: Israel Muñoz, Muneka Producciones and Koke Armero  Fotography: Raúl Barrio  Graphic design: María Peinado  Direction and Dramaturgy: Luz Arcas

Interpretation and Choreography: Luz Arcas and Koke Armero  Sound Space: Illo Muriel  Lighting: Luis Enrique Soria  Design and Scenic Space: La Phármaco  Fotography: Gustavo Rebollo  Graphic design: María Peinado  Direction and Dramaturgy: Luz Arcas