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.”