Season High Festival: the spectator crossed

Nine dancers for nine square white lights alternating to the pulse of the inputs of one, output of the other. In the hour or so that the show lasts, our body is constantly in demand, from the first entrance of a trombonist among the spectators, which makes the head turn and the insides vibrate, to when the white strobe light from the stage falls vertically on a male body, generating a thousand snapshots that joyfully recall some paintings by Francis Bacon, filtered in black and white. The still images created are those of a body in metamorphosis and decomposition, and the repetitive circular gesture that provokes these images is so simple that it seems that all of us, universally, could recognize ourselves in such tragic mutations. As if a body could be transcended into still images.

For the rest, the dance piece is a feat of strength for the nine bodies that release all the air from their lungs with steps and disco music, yoga, volleyball, dervish, fanfare, from a sepulchral atmosphere to a more joyful one. A few smiles could be glimpsed two-thirds of the way through this exhaustive show. Although the staging is minimalist, with the use of light limited to two tones, white and red, and the movement of the bodies to an empty stage with only a white rectangular curtain, a red circular light and that square of 3 x 3 square white lights above the stage, despite all this geometric purism, the feeling we get is that of a constant full house, and those multiple vibrations that pass through the spectator’s body would have more to do with the horror vacui of the neo-baroque. The light surrounds the bodies in the style of studio photographs and graphics from the 1950s, especially those moments when the dancing and tromboning bodies pass behind the curtain, and their silhouettes are diffracted in a gradient of light. It reminds us of a certain Chet Baker cover from 1954, or Warhol’s silkscreens and the psychedelic games that superimposed pure tones in the sixties, alluding to the brand new RGB lighting.

The bodies run on the track in a constant flight of whispers and coach commands and echoing metals, exhausting all possibility of reaction. And perhaps it is that fatigue produced that is the target of the denial of the title of the piece: THIS IS NOT. Followed by parentheses that may (or may not) be prolonging the beginning of the sentence: (an act of love & resistance). “This is not it,” period. What is this? This is, then, “an act of love and resistance.” Another possible and contrary reading, making the text run out loud: “This is not an act of love and resistance.” The ambiguity allows us not to take the piece as a contemporary pamphlet against the apathy generated by so many crises, so much contempt for the human body. As we watch and hear those athletes breathe, we remember how impossible it is for many to simply live, and the way in which governments around the world, south and north, punished our bodies twice during the pandemic.

PROGRAMMING of the High Season Festival

And they continue to do so.

Against apathy, strength. Against dictatorship, empowerment. Against social distancing, the complicity of the game. That red sun that beats like a heart and blurs in the white fabric with the alternation of other lights, would be a possible metaphor for these sentences that seem to last a lifetime and finally, with the combined action of a collective, are allowed to be overcome and finally shaped by desires.

From Spain to Peru passing through France, Aina Alegre gives us many reasons to believe in our power of agency, from the importance of “knowing” how to breathe, scream, take and occupy space, play a voluminous instrument, cross the accepted boundaries of the genre in all these simple actions. Hence the importance that they are women – one has all the shapes of a man, but the choreographer indicates that there are 9 women – and that they alternately reveal their breasts one after another, to visually and politically free their lungs. It is essential today to be able to appreciate the multitude of possible shapes of breasts and hips, to be able to see cellulite on an athletic body, and to tear down, at least mentally, the very restrictive canon of beauty.

Now, what is needed to overthrow is the canon of muscular beauty.

One comes out exhausted from so much gymnastic display, unable to believe that it has only been 70 minutes, it is like visually running a marathon while taking trombone lessons. Perhaps the accelerated set of so many sequences lacks unity, but it is a wonderful antidote to boredom and the audience at Teatro NOS of the PUCP felt in a trance at the end.

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