Kaspar Hauser.

Europe’s Orphan

La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea Kaspar Hauser
On May 26th, 1828 a strange young man, who could barely stand up, appeared in a plaza in Nuremberg. He carried an anonymous letter which gave scarce, contradictory information regarding his background and leaving him in the hands of those who found him.

 

 

Kaspar Hauser was immediately taken in by the city and later the whole country as a sort of social, political, and philosophical experiment. After six weeks he could speak rather fluently, he could read and write. It be came clear, from the boy himself, that he had lived up until that point in a cell, he slept on a straw mat, he heard no sounds, but there was a wooden horse there that he could play with. The brought him food at night (bread and water, occasionally with an opioid dressing). He told how a few days after gaining his freedom “the man who always accompanied him” showed him how to write his name and to speak the sentences that he repeated when he was found ( “A cavalryman like my father, I want to be” and “horse, horse”). Until that moment he had never seen a human being before.

 

 

La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea Kaspar Hauser
La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea Kaspar Hauser
Doctors decreed that he was neither crazy nor mentally impaired beyond what he suffered from his confinement. His learning process was headed mainly by Anselm von Feuerbach who testified on the boys strange intelligence: a special sensitivity towards painting and horsemanship, passion for reading and music. Kaspar never determined who it was that he saw in the mirror’s reflection, he also never assimilated the idea of a monotheistic god, he was repelled by christian imagery and hated latin, he didn’t differentiate between real life and dreams, and attributed free will to all living beings.

 

 

Feuerbach suspected that Kaspar was the eldest son of one of the lines of the Baden family, who intended to get rid of him in a hidden struggle for sovereignty, and that his confinement was the only alternative to death. He was never able to prove where he really came from.

 

 

He died, murdered in strange circumstances on December 17th, 1833. His tombstone reads “Here lies Kaspar Hauser, enigma of his time. His birthdate unknown. His death a mystery”

DIRECTION AND DRAMATURGY

Luz Arcas y Abraham Gragera

CHOREOGRAPHY AND INTERPRETATION

Luz Arcas

COMPOSITION AND MUSIC INTERPETATION

Carlos González

LIGHTING

Jorge Colomer

FOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO

Virginia Rota

GRAPHIC DESIGN

María Peinado

SCENOGRAPHY

Ana Montes

CUSTOME DESIGN

Heridadegato

PRODUCTION

Festival de Otoño a Primavera, Comunidad de Madrid y La Phármaco

La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea Kaspar Hauser
” Luz totally converts herself into Kaspar“Europe’s orphan”, starting from within and emanating outwards, through dance as only she knows how to. A work of extreme quality, of delicate plasticity and spot on performance, a performance that will leave no-one indifferent, placing her once more at the top of the pyramid of dance”
“In an astonishing embodiment of nuanced registers, at times violent and sharp at times full of a moving tenderness, Arcas tells the story of Kaspar Hauser offering her public a mirror to reflect upon themselves, with truly original accuracy. Something that is unable to be said, is created as Luz Arcas dances. Making us feel human, Us”

A great political emotion

La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea Una gran emoción política
A great political emotion is a scenic proposal inspired by the Memory of melancholy, an autobiography by Maria Teresa León, that covers the crucial years of our recent history, the ones from the civil war and exile: these years, marked by a political enthusiasm, the revolution’s myth and the faith in the utopias.

 

Without historical pretension but with the intention to reveal the archetypal and universal from those events, we will try to embody the political emotion which pushes people to believe in their right to intervene in the history of their country, as if they would own the future. This emotion in the 20th-century disasters – wars, totalitarianism, and their consequences – has been unjustified.
La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea Una gran emoción política
La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea Una gran emoción política
The dance and the physical action, the songs and breathing, the author’s original texts and the original musical proposal interpreted live, and inspired in European popular topics evokes María Teresa memories: episodes of her autobiography, like the Prado Museum preservation, the action in the entrenchment in Teatro de Guerrillas, political and social events like the women participation in the war and key concepts as collective body, the exile and the memory.

 

 

Through her memories, we are not pretending to dance Maria Teresa’s life, but her vision of the world, marked by an unstoppable empathy with the most underprivileged people full of contradictions, and the corrupted dream of seeing the success of a Republican and Communist Spain.

 

 

From the exile, Maria Teresa hoped to come back one day to her free country from the Franco dictatorship. When it finally happened, in 1977, the Alzheimer didn’t allow her to recognize her own homecoming. Spain and María Teresa suffered the same fate: the erased memory, the sickness of oblivion.

DIRECTOR AND DRAMATURGY

Luz Arcas and Abraham Gragera

INTERPRETATION

Luz Arcas, Elena González-Aurioles, Begoña Quiñones, Raquel Sánchez, Paula Montoya, Ignacio Jiménez, Verónica Garzón, Itxasai Mediavilla, Patricia Roldán, José Andrés López, Sara burgazzi and José Luis Sendarrubias 

CHOREOGRAPHY

Luz Arcas

CONCEPT, COMPOSITION AND MUSIC DIRECTION

Abraham Gragera

MUSIC COMPOSITION , PIANO AND PERCUSSION

Carlos González

BRASS AND VOICE

Cristian Buades

VIOLIN

David Santacecilia

LIGHTING

Jorge Colomer

PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO

Virginia Rota

GRAPHIC DESIGN

María Peinado

CUSTOM DESIGN

Paola de Diego

SCENOGRAPHY

Xosé Saqués

TEXT

María Teresa León

PRODUCTION

Centro Dramático Nacional and La Phármaco

La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea Una gran emoción política
“Luz Arcas is a dancer whose only ally is her body, and what it can be used to create, construct and bark. Dance is another form of politics, but of an intimate kind, that which doesn’t exhaust itself in a simple force but draws on many: poetry, translation, thought…. Because everything moves.
This Southern woman’s project isn’t restricted to the ghetto of professional dance, but goes in and out all those places where some kind of commotion or deviation is to be found. Dance is necessary. Her dance is necessary. Because it calls out for complicity and a place without making any specific demands. Because it provides the light in places where illumination can sometimes be salvation.”
“I, of course, was moved as a spectator by the tremendous political emotion of Luz Arcas, Abraham Gragera and the Pharmakos Dance Company. I felt my fist, my memory, my body, our defeats, the unbreakable loyalty I owe to my elders and all those many things that the young teach me, my young friends: all those things which can be proud of being right.”
“With A Great Political Emotion, La Phármaco turns memory into a physical experience of high poetic standing”.
“This is not a political rant; it is a slice of the world that ceased to exist in 1936. It speaks of a dignified, egalitarian and fair world, defined as democracy opposed any form authoritarianism, which achieved sovereignty for an impoverished people. Until a coup and a Civil War reduced all of those hopes to a utopia.”
La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea Una gran emoción política
La Phármaco Luz Arcas Compañía de Danza Contemporánea Una gran emoción política
“María Teresa León, embodied by Luz Arcas in a prodigious, overwhelming and tremendous initial solo: just when it seems that the performance abilities of this woman could not be any more sharpened or sensitive, even more surprising is the way in which what up until recently would have seemed impossible is rendered in natural registers”.
“A great emotion that brought the audience at the Cervantes to its feet”
“Arcas and Gragera have combined movement with the voice, breathing and music to the service of constructing a tremendously beautiful visual monument to honour and commemorate intellectuals from the Generation of 27. The production exudes passion, emotion, hope, expectation, melancholy and utopia in equal measure.”
“But when memory relating to reason and the heart deserts us –Evgueni Evtuchenko said thus in a beautiful poem– the memory of the body remains. And that, the third memory, is what Luz Arcas has to offer. First of all, embodying her in a beautiful solo full of energy in which a thousand María Teresas –the sensual young women, the revolutionary with her fist in the air, the women scared by bombs, she who had to go into exile–emerge from the body of the dancer burning up, as brilliant and full of nuances as the writer herself”.