Compañía Nacional de Danza

Enrique Escorza

About the show

The Compañía Nacional de Danza returns to Centro Danza Matadero to present the world première of Struere: new original creations for the company by Luz Arcas (MASA) and Mattia Russo & Antonio de Rosa - Kor'sia (TABLERO).

MASA

MASA is a pictorial trance, an iconographic journey that explores the masses as a telluric entity, a mythological anatomy in constant metamorphosis—from the masses of the devout to the protesting masses, from a swarm of bees to volcanic lava...—always overwhelming, amorphous, sublime..

I am interested in the mass as a power that lies dormant, awaiting the right context to resurface – a new victim, an exalted leader... – a power we have seen erupt at key moments in history, transforming it and diverting it in unexpected directions, often lucidly; at other times, terrifyingly. The mass, an infallible political and social weapon, highly manipulable, is capable of almost anything.

The crowd overwhelms the eye, and reason too: it is unfathomable, inconceivable and difficult to represent. To dance it involves invoking a collective and extreme energy, pleasurable and dangerous, welcoming and suffocating, which resists representation.

Featureless, nameless bodies; fragments of bodies; bodies dissolved, infected, multiplying. A unison of prayers, proclamations, ovations. Bodies in panic, bodies in ecstasy, bodies on the run. Bodies and more bodies. Body-All. All-Body.

Luz Arcas

TABLERO

A plank falls.

It is not a collapse, but a foundation.

The pieces find their places, arrange themselves, lean on one another: origin, root, foundation… A territory that supports and connects. The wood reveals its primary function: to support from below.

But, as there is no matter without gesture nor memory without a substrate, each plank bears an imprint, a trace: the footsteps of those who were there, gestures that are repeated, stories passed from one voice to another, the laughter of those who played, hands that built and cared, people who found their place in the world.

In this sensitive map of the collective, nothing remains fixed. Everything is organised, shifts, transforms. A tableau vivant that is assembled and dismantled, where each arrangement retains something of the previous one, even if it is no longer the same. Tradition becomes present.

TABLERO as a contemporary square. A space where identity is not declared, but produced, woven, constructed. A reflection on culture as a living practice, which is not a monument, but a process; which is not an image, but a shared experience. Where past and present coexist as the foundation of that which, in its permanence, mutates, transforms… indisputable, indefinable, ALIVE.

Agnès López-Río

See the cast & crew team here

artistic direction

Muriel Romero

Luz Arcas

Winner of the 2024 National Dance Prize, Luz Arcas is a dancer, choreographer and stage director. She founded the La Phármaco Company in 2009.

Her most recent creations are Tierras raras and Morphine (Nana para Emmy Hennings). Her previous work has been compiled in two projects: Bekristen/Tríptico de la prosperidad (2019- 2023), featuring the pieces La domesticación, Somos la guerra and La buena obra, and Ciclo de los milagros (2020- 2022), featuring the pieces Toná, Trilla and Mariana.

She has choreographed for the Víctor Ullate Ballet (2018), the Compañía Nacional de Danza de El Salvador (2019 and 2021), and the Peruvian Institute of Consumption and New Environment (IPCNA) (2021). She has choreographed the opera Rigoletto (2023), directed by Miguel del Arco. She has directed and choreographed the work Bordo Poniente, produced by Guadalajara University, the International Book Fair of that same city, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the Directorate of Legal Affairs of Mexico City (DAJU) (Mexico, 2024).

As stage director, she has created Todas las santas (2022), in collaboration with the Salvadoran actresses Egly Larreynaga and Alicia Chong, and Psicosis 4.48 (2023), co-produced by the Teatro Español de Madrid. The protagonist, Natalia Huarte, received the Max Award for Best Actress (2024) for the latter.

She has produced artistic projects in India (National School of Drama, New Delhi, 2015) and Equatorial Guinea (Malabo, 2015 - 2016) and is the author of the book Pensé que bailar me salvaría, published by Contintametienes.

Arcas has also received the 2nd Godot Award for Best Dance Work for Mariana (2023), and was a finalist in the 2023 Talía Awards for Best Female Dance Performer. She was a finalist in the 2022 Max Awards, in various categories, with Somos la guerra, and for Best Dance Performer with Kaspar Hauser. El huérfano de Europa in 2017. She has received the Ojo Crítico de Danza Award (2015) and Best Dance Performer prize at the Lorca Awards that same year. She has also won the Injuve Award (2009) and the Málaga Crea Award (2009).

Kor'sia

Based in Madrid, Kor’sia is an artists’ collective directed by choreographers Antonio de Rosa and Mattia Russo, in collaboration with the researcher Giuseppe Dagostino and the playwright and lecturer in Performing Arts, Agnès López-Río.

Their work is grounded in the body as a tool for thought, emotion, and transformation, with the aim of activating performative devices capable of imagining possible new modes of existence.

Their artistic horizons extend beyond their own creations, with collaborations that include the Nederlands Dans Theater, the GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, the Theater Luzern, the Bern Ballet, the Opéra National du Rhin, the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, the Das Hessische Staatstheater Wiesbaden, the Ballets de Monte-Carlo, and the Opéra Grand Avignon, among others.

Their works have graced major international stages such as the Théâtre National de la Danse Chaillot, Tanz im August, the Grec Festival de Barcelona, the Mercat de les Flors, and La Biennale di Venezia, among others.

Their creation Mont Ventoux (2023) earned them the prestigious Fedora – Van Cleef & Arpels Ballet Prize, the Max Prize for Best Dance Show, and was named as Best Show of the Year by Time Out.