TOTENTANZ - MORGEN IST DIE FRAGE

An installation, a video and a performance is the threefold proposal to talk about death by La Veronal, one of the most internationally renowned dance companies today. Directed by Marcos Morau.

It is a doleful yet euphoric phantasmagoria based on a séance session to celebrate the fragility of life.

As practice, ritual and cliché, the mediaeval dance of death gives us a poetically pertinent image of death and the justice it metes out: we all end up staring it in the face; everyone inevitably reaches the fatal hour. Revisiting the dance of death well into the twenty-first century, in the maelstrom of a world hurtling towards its own terminal chaos through thousands of social, digital and spiritual revolutions, is a deliberate anachronism, almost a meditation.
Our Totentanz is just an invitation to celebrate the fragility of life and to meditate on how it has lost value. We have all built a world where death is more normalised and closer than ever. And at the same time, it has never seemed so far away, so remote and incomprehensible. The current disdain for the values of life is directly proportional to the widespread inability to interpret, dance or officiate death as a mystery. More than five centuries later, the dance of death is back to teach us to question where we’re going, who we are and what this place we inhabit means, before death takes us by the hand and embraces us in its dance.
— Marcos Morau


On the critic...
"Highlights the exquisite and powerful aesthetics of its four dancers and two puppets of a truly touching truthfulness (...), soaked in religious symbolism with a certain air kitsch and futuristic at the same time. ( ...) The dancers and a subtle interaction with the audience (and therein lies its strength), where Lorena Nogal stands out especially, last National Dance Award in performance, are really amazing." (Mercedes L. Caballero, El País - Babelia)

«We are in the heart of a slow procession that aspires to be painful and solemn. It is a choreography of dancing, unkempt and half-naked spirits with some grotesque scratches. A succession of fades. Here death has a masculine aspect. In many countries and cultures, the word itself to identify it is masculine». (Vincenzo Sardelli, Krapp’s Last Post)

«A tour guided by the iconic presence of three dancers and one dancer, the emblematic Lorena Nogal, to whom death, tied to two large female puppets in white shirts, clung with its trembling. The impression of that fog which enveloped the bodies of the spectators, pushed, step by step, towards an unknown place is indelible». (Francesca Pedroni, il manifesto)


COMPLEMENTARY INFO ↓

Our Mortal Waltz by Allison C. Meier
Morgen ist die Frage, by Elsa Estrella Echevarría (ctxt)