Pere Faura

This dance project is about and around dance. Through the use of 4 well renowned iconic choreographies of dance history, as well as part of the performer’s own dance history, the performance proposes their re-embodiment and re-contextualization as a historical and symbolic gesture of recognition and admiration, as well as an exercise of humorist self-criticism about the dance world and its references. A choreographic collage between the tap dancing of “Singin’ in the Rain”, the disco dancing of “Saturday night fever”, the contemporary dance of Rosas, and the classical ballet of “The Dying Swan”… This performance doesn’t pretend to be a mere multidisciplinary explosion, although it combines different languages. It does not want to become a banal celebration of the diversity in dance, although it displays different choreographic realities. The exaggerated smile of Gene Kelly. The coolness of Travolta. The mathematical perfection of Keersmaeker. The virtuoso drama of Plitseskaya. The easiness to happiness from musical comedies. The impossibility to choreograph the freedom of disco. The dramaturgy of abstract movement repetition. The maximum stylization of the representation of death. Every fragment, every gesture, every dance is not only the expression of a formal discipline or movement style. Each of them is a dance synthesis of a larger chorographical practice, which could be understood as a positioning towards life, a way to understand and interpret reality. “No dance, no paradise” is a personal selection of some of these ways, a review of the influence of those views, a tribute to my childhood as a dancer to redefine my passions as a choreographer. Oscar Wilde said that the only duty we have with history is to rewrite it. So, I decided to organize a personal rewriting of a personal history. But it is not novel or essay, rather a kind of danced comic vignettes, with no story nor drama, but with moving drawings and texts about the old dances of these four heroes which still captivate us with their ephemeral powers.

 

Pere Faura