Zoo! | antescollado

Zoo! is a dance project that I started in October 2020. It has been co-produced by Grec festival 2021 of Barcelona and supported by Graner, creation centre of dance and live art of Barcelona. I made a first presentation in July at the Mercat de les Flors, dance house of Barcelona.

Throughout our long research process, the team and I wanted to develop the close relationship between ballroom dancesport and zoological garden. We wanted to rethink how the zoological and ballroom dancesport exposes the bodies, in terms of exhibition, exotism and appropiation. It is a thematic investigation in which I would like to continue working in the coming years.

Incorporating these reflections, we wanted to develop a body that dwells in those frontiers, in the limits between the dancer and the animal, the corporeal and the spatial, the real and the symbolic. Located within the boundaries of a zoo, the project seeks forms with which dance tosses out this ghost that institutes borderlines, that defines and limits the shapes of our bodies. Is there a better place than the zoo to reaffirm that the (human) body is constituted by a myriad of other bodies, a myriad of corporeal phantoms?. Therefore, we have been working as plastically as possible, with images and dances so to project onto my body its doubles, its shadows, its phantoms, expanding the borders of our ‘humanity’/’animality’.

Such as we see the zoo portrayed as a device to create a single body ghost, for the creation process of this project I have been working with dance as a method to reveal a manifold body, possessed by other bodies and figures.

My methodological approach is to choreograph the body next to its doubles, invoking the figures that live dormant in my body (or each of the bodies), gestures and postures. For this, I will not only have my physical tools, but also the material and symbolical power of space, scenography and illumination, crucial for the research.

Team

Fotografías de Tristán Pérez Martín.