| 
X FESTIVAL DE JEREZ
March 9th, 2006
Text & photos: Estela Zatania
COMPAÑÍA
DE DANZA ESPAÑOLA DE AÍDA GÓMEZ “Carmen”
Teatro Villamarta, 2100h
Carmen: Aída Gómez. Don José: José
Huertas. Escamillo: Primitivo Daza. Manuelita: Montse Vindel.
Zúñiga: Fermín Calvo de Mora. Lillias
Pastia: Eduardo Carranza. Corps de ballet: Rocío
Muñoz, Sara Martín, Rocío Osuna, María
Jiménez, Yolanda Barrero, Yolando Murillo, Sara Nieto,
María Alonso, Bárbara Moreno, Maximiliano
Rebman, Juan Carlos Sánchez, Francisco Morgado, David
Martin, Carlos Rodríguez, Emilio serrano.Music: José
Antonio Rodríguez, Georges Bizet.
“Something for everyone” the festival organizers
have been touting, and Thursday evening, March 9th, was
proof. After the acoustic recital of classic cante shared
by Huelva singer Antonio “Pitingo”, and from
Jerez, Macarena Moneo, with the guitars of Juan Carmona
“Camborio” (Ketama) and Manuel Moneo “Barullito”
respectively, the Villamarta theater presented the work
of Aída Gómez. Yet another version of “Carmen”
in Spanish dance, offered the opportunity to see what professional
theater is like. Suggestive choreography for the numerous
group of polished professionals, excellent costuming, appropriate
but canned music by José Antonio Rodríguez,
a coherent story line, a sense of humor (a fat bearded dancer
dressed up as a cabaret girl triggered laughter with his
belly-dance), the fight scene, half danced, half acted,
that was so effective it earned effusive applause....all
this, and no José Valencia.
ISRAEL GALVÁN, “Tábula
rasa”
Sala la Compañía, 12 midnight
Dance: Israel Galván. Cante: Inés Bacán.
Piano: Diego Amador.
The frontier between authentic genius and intellectual
conceit is never easy to map out. This is the nebulous zone
sprinkled with pitfalls inhabited by Israel Galván.
His creativity and desire to explore new paths are clearly
authentic, but what’s not always certain is whether
the message comes across.
 The
premise of “Tábula Rasa” is simple: one
piano recital, one a capella cante recital, one dancer who
dances with no accompaniment whatsoever, allegedly to the
auditive memory of the first two. Some wag once said, “if
someone’s willing to pay money for it, it must be
art”, and last night a lot of people paid a lot of
money to share that nebulous frontier zone with Israel Galván
where the management takes no responsibility and each member
of the audience must assume the risk. Diego Amador’s
long piano recital had people studying the wings to see
if the dancer wasn’t about to come on, and the second
recital within a recital, Inés Bacán, with
no accompaniment other than her own hand upon a table, found
more than one member of the audience fumbling for a light
to see how much time had gone by with no sign of Israel.
It was an extremely difficult hour to sit through for those
who had come to see Spain’s most recent winner of
the National Prize for Dance. But of course, he is the brains
behind the show so you’re actually seeing him from
the first moment.
By the time Galván finally materialized, we were
starved for sensory stimuli and made a very big effort to
retain the sound of the piano and the voice because we knew
there would be nothing to back up the dance: just the floor,
a box of resin, some one hundred cubic meters of air and
Israel Galván’s mind to fill them up in the
remaining 45 minutes. Galvanesque moves start to flow...the
profile with the arched back, the elbows forced back, the
fingers that serve as silent castanets and fans, the leg
suspended in the air, the swagger... There are some new
elements. Strange noises emit from his mouth and he plays
the sound of castanets with fingernails on teeth. The silence
becomes an element to be worked, every sound is magnified.
Just a few nights earlier Andrés Marín, another
dancer who travels the inner space of the mind, forced us
to draw our limits and demonstrated that as long as there’s
compás and good cante, anything is possible. Israel
has eliminated the voice, the guitar and compás as
known to man...there is compás, but he doesn’t
share it and the rest of us must scramble to sniff it out.
He dances barefoot, he approaches the piano and plays a
note to briefly move to its resonance, he creates charicatures
of a flamenco dancer, makes the sound of a galloping horse,
whistles...
Israel Galván’s previous work, “La Edad
de Oro”, was hermetically perfect and you left the
theater feeling the sublime catharsis brought on by all
great art. “Tábula Rasa” doesn’t
go that far, nor does it even seem to be trying. The audience
applauded effusively and at length.
|
map 
shopping cart 
help 
