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.

In the beginning everything was exuberant: bodies and their strength, nature and its attributes, earth, matter. The divine was still everywhere: flesh, fruit, sex. In the beginning, before the gods and the word, everything was violent: bodies and their strength, their power and their waste. Bodies expose their instincts (desire, mother tongue) to the economic inertias that will end up erasing them. The economy begins in the Neolithic period with the domestication of plants and animals, including human beings. Since then, history has been a continuous succession of different domestication projects.

DIRECCIÓN ARTÍSTICA (COREOGRAFÍA, DRAMATURGIA, ESPACIO Y VESTUARIO)

Luz Arcas

DANCE

La Merce, Danielle Mesquita, Javiera Paz y Galina Rodríguez

MÚSICA

Le Parody

ILUMINACIÓN

Jorge Colomer

MIRADA EXTERNA

Victoria Aimé y Rafael 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.”

“It is a resounding cultural clash woven to perfection”.

“The new project by the Pharmakos Dance Company is beautiful, as much from a dramaturgical as from a visual perspective. The commitment of the dancers is complete and their energy is transmitted from the beginning to the end of the show”.

“Bekristen puts forward a unique look at the world: that of a free body”.

“Against that domestication the show proposes a rebellion through dance, the finding of its own rhythm, with forms specific to dance above and beyond homogenization, with hybridity”.

“The show takes no prisoners. Perhaps because domination doesn’t either”.