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frontlines
Cuerpo de Sombra y Luz
The dance programme of this year's International Festival is hauling bare bodies - and visual artists — out of the shadows and into the spotlight. Nudity has featured prominently in two of the four works by the young Frenchman Boris Charmatz, while Brussels-based, American dance-theatre innovator Meg Stuart's Appetite was conceiVed in close collaboration with installation artist Ann Hamilton.
Spanish choreographer Juan Carlos Garcia, artistic director of the company Lanonima Imperial, goes one better in both cases. His bold, sweeping dance Cuerpo de Sombra y Luz (which translates as 'Body Of Darkness And Light') contains much rippling naked flesh. Inspiration for the disrobing came from Garcia's intense feelings for the work of multimedia artist Paloma Navares.
'Seeing her installations,‘ Garcia says, 'I always have the sensation of being filled with wonder. Her work overflows with eroticism, reverie and enchantment. It has a quality which is difficult to find in the art of our times - lack of noise.’
Navares's varied body of work speaks loudly and clearly about her interests in the human form, particularly the feminine nude as represented throughout art history. Using Navares's designs and video footage, Garcia has tried to capture her fragmented classicism on-stage. The tone of the resultant dance piece has been compared to being wide-awake in a dream.
‘For me,’ Garcia explains, 'dance is so far away from what is verbal or from literature, but close to physical memory.’ In ,7 Cuerpo, the casually close "if; ,’ encounters of Garcia's seven . :_. 3 dancers escalate into a relentless "' ecstasy that is anything but forgettable. (Donald Hutera) Cuerpo de Sombra y Luz (International) Lanonima Imperial, Playhouse, 473 2000,
3-4 Sep, 7.30pm, £5—f20.
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