HONTANAR
On a sunny square in the old city of Uzès, passers-by, alerted by the aggressive/anguished sounds of stones in a landslide, could watch Hontanar, a duet by Olga de Soto (who also dances in flawless affinity with her accomplice Pascale Gigon.) Corresponding to the 'poetical burden' of Réné Char, she inflicts the bodies (dressed in overalls) to the painful and liberating experience of deconstruction: that which unfolds in an apparently suspended time, between repetitions and in a fleeing space. The full and dislocated bodies give sense to this violent game, destabilising the conventions linked to the horizontal and vertical. The dancers caress and strike the wall, scaling itand sliding down it with fluidity (sometimes with their head towards the ground.) The movement gives the bodies the force to defy the injuries which gnaw at them and favours the birth of a happy, almost provocative, fullness.
Jean-Marc Lachaud, SKÊNÊ No. 2-3, The body: exhibition / revelation, 1998
The viewer must operate two planes of perception. One is gestural, on which the two young women move slowly, standing, first on the ground, then against the wall, which they climb head down. The other is sound, in which rocks roll cautiously, crushing something like glass or sand, in an infinite and material melody, insinuating the anguish of the wound by force of friction. (…) How can we admit the dancers who, in overalls, draw three planes, the first, not surprisingly, vertical, according to the dominant norm, the second horizontal, on which the figures, standing data, appear as if flattened, foreshortened, and finally the third, against the wall they climb upside-down, in a sort of "flow-climb," they call it, head down, overturning the world, defying gravity? They traverse these three planes in a loop, like sound; the visual manipulation of the dimensions of space refers to the acoustic distortion of the auditory space. (…) The visual and the auditory are like two lines on the same staff. Whence exquisite pleasure.
Jean-Jacques Delfour, Membrane bodies, CASSANDRE, Septembre-Octobre 1997
Olga de Soto’s artistic lucidity and experience allow her to alter not only her creative process from one piece to the next, but also to alter the states of the body that correspond to the variations in her language. As such, in Hontanar (Spanish for 'group of springs', 1996), a discontinuous movement with no special accentuations is declined using a fragmentary body language of which the source would be the support propagating its energy through the body. So, floors and walls are used in astounding percussion-like horizontal kicking and bucking, as if they were the surface of the world.