Iván Alcázar Serrat
COLUMN ON CONSTELLATION OLGA DE SOTO | MERCAT DE LES FLORS
About TO INCORPORATE THAT WHICH REMAINS HERE AT THE IN MY HEART
When the performance penetrated the theatre, rescuing the audience from the missionary posture - taking the dead weight of the text off their shoulders - the audience and the stage burst into a great orgasm, and that cry was felt even behind the museum walls. As a theatre-goer, I have always suspected that dance, freed from the word and breathing with fewer corsets, dared to go further in its search for new forms: it leapt into the void with less fear and often returned with new discoveries. TO INCORPORATE THAT WHICH REMAINS HERE AT THE IN MY HEART, among the other shows in this constellation dedicated to Olga de Soto, corroborates my suspicions, and proves - from the title itself - that, when the visual arts dance with the arts of movement, they continue to form a hypnotic and unbeatable team.
Dance and movement hybridised in an inspired and lucid self-exploration have been the focus of one of Olga de Soto's previous works: Eclats Mats (2001), on which TO INCORPORATE is founded, was based on the confrontation and crossings of music and movement, as well as on the analysis of action verbs, in a resumption after the tabula rasa of the so-called "non-dance". In Débords / Reflections on The Green Table, de Soto investigated Kurt Jooss's 1932 ballet, linking dance and historical research: political essay, memories and interviews, to present in another way the memory of an eminently ephemeral art (Boris Charmatz opted for another encouraging format: bringing the dancers to the museum). Making a play on words, if a few years ago Xavier Le Roy displayed a handful of works in his Retrospective (at the Fundación Tàpies in Barcelona), what Olga de Soto does with TO INCORPORATE could be described as an "introspective": more than an exhibition, an overexposure that leaves the art of the dancers wholly exposed.
The Latin term spectacula designated the spectator's place rather than what was offered on the stage. It is, therefore, a point of view and not a finished object, which activates the scenic gear. An intention, a desire, a curiosity: the spectacular is the action of looking. In TO INCORPORATE, a performer always does, and another observes and supports him or her. These secondary characters appear and disappear, sometimes in a strange way, under the linoleum floor. The actions of one and the gaze of the other are equally important. They are constantly tensing and balancing the sway of this choreography, which begins quietly and mysteriously and progresses until it becomes disturbing and unsettles us. Organised in a triptych [quadriptych], it consists of a series of variations on a theme, which allows us to discover what we had seen in the first instance, or rather: what had escaped us, and we had failed to see.
The quadriptych, understood in this way, would lead us from spontaneity to viscerality, freeing us from a layer of skin in each act. We cross the surface of visuality and find a more cerebral and memoiristic facet, more sensitive, haptic and sensorial until we descend towards a nervous, cartilaginous, even bloody reality. Someone wrote that the beautiful is only the beginning of the terrible, of what we can still bear. If the film Avatar: The Way of Water, currently in theatres, invites us to drown ourselves in a soporific 3D immersion in the cinema, and the avalanche of images and selfies on social networks bog down everyday life with their pristine and impermeable presence, or the metaverse promises us new, simpler and more ethereal worlds... here, it goes in a diametrically opposite direction. But what would be the term that best describes the opposite of alienation? Whatever it is, it would define well this show that proposes interweaving the here and now with the before and under, cutting and emptying the stage just as Buñuel cut that eye. The sounds of the metronomes of clepsydras (water clocks) are transformed into sacrificial altars that soften and melt, undoing the instant. At the same time, on stage, the mischievous and playful exercises of a dancer dressed as a child's fable, the tasks of a dancer who, in a space more and more charged with tensions, echoes and reverberations, tries to remember, revisit, reproduce what has happened, and a third dancer orchestrates a burst of impulses, feelings, sensations, where everything is touched, and everything is stained until the diaphanous and aseptic space is filled and densified in a mess of sounds, folds, fabrics, remains, fragments, puddles, fluids and flows.
Perhaps I'm entirely wrong, but the spirit of Fluxus - being and becoming, emptiness and fullness, the gravity of lightness, and vice versa - runs through the danced reflection and reflexive dance of TO INCORPORATE. Cycles, rhymes, counter positions, progressions: a game of complex attempts where the action is first made, then remade, and finally undone, in a movement that flips and becomes explicit (that's why INCORPORAR | KIDs is shortened to a joyful and enigmatic version of the first part of the mother piece). The four acts move irremediably from what is seen from the outside to what is felt from the inside. The plot could give rise to a conceptual or minimalist performance, but this essential force is equally sufficient to construct a raw and unadorned thriller. And indeed, it allows us to jump into the void and find and see and look at so many things: to look at and analyse the rhythms, to incarnate the various facets of corporeality, to show how space is the product of the body and not its abstract container, to concretise the violence that hides all formalisation, all form. What I rashly intuit and summarise in a somewhat clumsy way, the show unfolds in an hour and a half of mystery and delicacy, balance and elegance, power and serenity; while there are imposing essays and books that need five hundred pages (at least) to explain it to us.
Iván Alcázar Serrat, Column on Constellation Olga de Soto, Recomana, Feb 2, 2023
original text in Catalan
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Iván Alcázar Serrat holds a PhD in architecture from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. He is a researcher specialising in the theory and history of architecture, space and the arts, particularly the visual arts, the arts of movement and the performing arts. Member of the Observatori d'Espais Escènics-Theatres At Risk. Editor of the Enciclopèdia de les Arts Escèniques Catalanes (EAEC), the PRAEC (Projecte de Recerca de les Arts Escèniques Catalanes) / Institut del Teatre de la Diputació de Barcelona. Contributor to various cultural media (architecture, culture, theatre), including the magazine liquidDocs, among others.