Yerbagüena (oscuro brillante) – Teatro Villamarta – Festival de Jerez 2025
Cover photo: Ana Palma (photo gallery & vídeo)
The title is not mine: I stole it. It belongs to Manuel Liñán, I admit it. The theft is justified because there are always different ways to say things, but this one captures the essence—so why overthink it? Last night, Eva, la Yerbabuena, made the stage of a packed Teatro Villamarta tremble, not through a complex spectacle of conceptual scaffolding, but quite the opposite: with nothing more than chairs and musicians, the Granada-born dance maestro granted the most important and simplest of permissions—the one that dwells between awe and pleasure. You only had to see the knowing smiles on stage.
Although the program spoke of polarities and opposites, what we witnessed was more of an axis with its extremes. With a barely perceptible connecting thread, Eva moves between introspective scenes, delving into well-defined, insistent, dark edges, only to give way to moments where all seams burst open, revealing a dancer at her peak—wise, creative, disciplined, joyful, and lightning-fast. She seems to be saying that one cannot exist without the other.
The rawness and transparency of the artist’s nineteenth production were evident from the start, as she welcomed the audience with the lights up, not even giving them time to take off their coats as they observed the irregular movements of the cast between the chairs. And suddenly—pim, pam—a blackout, and without warning, an explosive bulería por soleá, with the force of the seas, flooding the stalls. What intensity, what power, what catharsis!
With an apparently simple language that flows organically and naturally, beyond the obvious—the dance, the percussion and electronics of Daniel Suárez, the lighting design, the musical direction and guitar of Paco Jarana, the dance and support of El Oruco—there is an unshakable element: the singing. What a way to hold, sustain, strike where it hurts, all as one. Miguel Ortega, Segundo Falcón, Ezequiel Montoya, and Antonio Gómez “El Turry” throw themselves in without a safety net, with absolute commitment and dedication, igniting the core of Yerbagüena with every ingredient: the dark, the bright, the weighty, the rigid, the fury, the curved, the colorful.
From the blend of voices, of such distinct timbres interwoven even spatially, emerges a round of fandangos de Huelva fired like artillery cannons, each singer giving their all in every verse, fiercely battling against the elements, holding nothing back. They take turns singing raw, one after another. Then another round, this time to the beat. The lights highlight what cannot be seen. The entire theater holds its breath. I don’t miss a thing. Do you?
Eva shines, and with her, so does everyone. La Yerbabuena needs nothing more.
