Production, distribution,
& administration
for performing arts

MARCELA SANTANDER CORVALÁN

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DISPARUE

CREATION 2016

Choreography and performance Marcela Santander Corvalán
In collaboration with Mathilde Hennegrave , Ana Rita Teodoro et Amanda Piña.
Text Mathilde Hennegrave

Costum Corinne Petitpierre
Sound design Maya Garcia
Light design Maël Iger
Sound manager Arnaud De la Celle or Vanessa Court
Light manager Antoine Crochemore
Production, distribution, administration Fabrik Cassiopée – Manon Crochemore
Thanks to Volmir Cordeiro, Margot Videcoq, Daniel Zimmerman, Mickaël Phelippeau, Olivier Martin-Salvan, Matthieu Banvillet and the whole Quartz team.

Executive production Fabrik Cassiopée
Production Le Quartz, Scène nationale de Brest
Coproduction CND Centre National de la Danse
With the support of NadaLokal et Ministry of Movement Affairs (Vienne), Ménagerie de Verre (Paris) 

 

For this solo piece, I began with a position taken from the duo, Epoque – a piece created with Volmir Cordeiro based on dances by 20th century female artists. We were inspired by a Japanese dance someone once described to me, but that I’d never seen. This dance I’d never seen has continued to intrigue me. Starting with this blind spot and lack of information, I intend to dive into this position to develop a dance.

For this dance, I will be squatting. I will be low, I will see things from below.

I will dive into this phantom position, near the ground, to visit the memory of the gestures that compose it. It is an ancient position, one of waiting, of work, a sometimes difficult, uncomfortable position that could be thought to make movement impossible.

By exploring this squatting position, I travel through time, from the pre-Columbian Andes to its most contemporary resurgences in Western culture.

I want this gesture to delve into the different temporal and geographical layers of the body. Through this, my position becomes the territory of a living archive. An active memory.

I am looking for a new space for fiction. I state what I see below and what is happening there. My hair, breasts, sex, and legs will build a dance “from below.” I will not be able to collapse, I will not be able to leap into the air, my knees will be bent, I will walk, I will jump, I will dance.

 

Marcela Santander Corvalán

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ÉPOQUE

CREATION 2015

conception and performingVolmir Cordeiro and Marcela Santander Corvalán
Light Maël Guiblin

thanks to Clarisse Chanel, Carolina Mendonça, Phelipe Janning and Quartz team

coproduction Le Quartz, Scène nationale de Brest
with the help of la Ménagerie de Verre (Paris), Casa do Povo (Sao Paulo - BR), le CND, un centre d'art pour la danse

 

Made up of ecstasy, pleasure, subversion, lasciviousness, terror, extravagance and joy, these dances require a prodigious ability to leap from one mood to another, to engage with the most irreverent stories, and to shake, dislocate and throw the body off balance. Behind every emotion is a range of imagined possibilities allowing us to bring a variety of presences, approaches and interdependent modes of sensation to the stage.

Epoch is a study, an inventory of dances in which 20th century female artists explore the performance of contorted movements. We began by reading the descriptions of the dances written by the artists then transcribed these writings into simple partitions. Thus made fiction, these partitions transform words into movement and enable us to create works that are independent of the sources that inspired them. Once we used the power of words to produce movement, these dances that we had never seen, came to life, telling the story of the desynchronization of two dancers; like dancing the difference between two different eras, between words and sensations, between theatre and nostalgia.

The title, Epoch, evokes a certain quality more than a specific time. In this performance, different elements are explored and interpreted to reanimate an intimate and vibrant story, that has been forgotten or lost in the symbolic past of our journey as dancers. Here dance is used as a raw and direct means to revisit and revivify an archive whose insistent vitality resonates with our present. Epoch is a search for magic. The magic of an enigma, of mystery, of the power of the moment and the way its constant renewal provides the basis for our movement.

Epoch is made up of the following dances: The subversion of 1920, The terror of 1929, The extravagance of 1926, The mystery of 1996, The conquest of 2001, Le vertigo of 1968, The domination of ?, The euphoria of 1925, The belief of 1965, The resurrection of 1973, The ice of 1922, The lasciviousness of 1917, The pleasure of 1927, The dream of 1929, The ecstasy of 1920, The revolt of 1924 and The excess of 2015.

Marcela Santander Corvalán & Volmir Cordeiro

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QUIETOS

 

CREATION ON NOVEMBER 14th 2019 AT MANEGE, SCENE NATIONALE DE REIMS

 

Conception, chorégraphie Marcela Santander Corvalán
Collaboration artistique Bettina Blanc Penther
Interprétation Bettina Blanc Penther & Marcela Santander Corvalán 
Création sonore Vanessa Court
Création lumières Antoine Crochemore
Regard extérieur Gérald Kurdian 
Production, diffusion, administration Fabrik Cassiopée – Manon Crochemore & Manon Joly
Remerciements Roberto Moura, Ëvelie Mouila, Mataki, Hortense Belhôte, José Pérez de Arce, Nina Santes, Emilie Hériteau et toutes les participantes au projet IMAGINE à Aubervilliers

 

Executive production Fabrik Cassiopée
Coproduction manège scène nationale – Reims (FR), Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans – Direction Maud Le Pladec  (FR), Centre National de la Danse – Pantin (FR), La Villette, Paris (FR), Escales Danse en Val d’Oise (FR), Next Festival
With the help of la DRAC Ile-de-France, Région Ile-de-France
Avec le soutien de NAVE – Centro de creación y residencia – Santiago du Chili (CL)

 

“At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon me.”
Michel Foucault, Orders of Discourse (translation Rupert Swyer)

 

“I will sing of what I would rather not sing,” says she in the first line of her song. “She” is the 12th century Beatrice, Countess of Dia and trobairitz (female troubadour). But what is this story that she wishes not to tell and of which she nevertheless gives an account?
We started off from this foreboding line to travel much farther beyond, to the deepest forgotten landscapes, to collect the voices of these first women composers. From this wealth of words and melodies, we have created a dialogue between these lyrics that sometimes repeat at distances of kilometers and years. With this as a base to gather a collection of listening postures and dances from various folk traditions, we looked for the archetypes of the listening position in various cultures. Each of these postures of scattered origins became matter that would act as a base for a new score formed of assembling, cutting out, and superimpositions. The big challenge: finding, through dance, the silence of bodies and a place that makes it possible to hear these words.

For us, “I will sing of what I would rather not sing” is like the promise of a future narrative, which each person will be able to invent depending on how it resonates within them. We take this locution from Beatrice’s story so as to concentrate fully on each word. Indeed, this locution contains within it a force like incantation. It’s in between these words that we invite you to fantasize your own fictional story. This initial line, which leaves so much unanswered, will be the starting point for the development of the piece, making us drift among all the other words that it evokes.

In Spanish, the word quieto is used to describe a place, a situation, or a calm event without hustle and bustle—after a big storm for example. It can also be used as an order, as when we say “Quieto!” to make children acting wild be quiet. For this piece, Quieto becomes Quietos in the plural and takes on the sound of a place name: an imaginary place that’s both gentle and mysterious.

The space will be inhabited by two characters engaged in dialogue. They may meet or separate but are always linked together by a common dreamlike landscape. On the bare stage, the two performers will wander around a constantly changing soundscape made up of women speaking, songs, sound effects, and recorded sounds of nature throughout the creation process. On the empty stage, sound will replace the theater set and will lead us from one place to another. It’s sound that will indicate the trail and the signs. Based on work on texture and spatialization, sound will provide the image of this invisible place through which the performers cross.

We’re not looking to say something new, but rather to make what has already been spoken heard. Suppose everything has already been said and we just need to listen. In that case, how can we reorganize the body and invent a dance for listening and display listening not as a passive practice but as an action in and of itself? The power within this action would be equivalent to that of crying out, yet it will have transformed and become the opposite.

 

Marcela Santander Corvalán

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CONCHA   

Histoires d'écoute

 

CREATION ON DECEMBER 2ND 2020 AT LA POP, INCUBATEUR ARTISTIQUE ET CITOYEN - PARIS

 

Conception Marcela Santander Corvalán & Hortense Belhôte
Performing Hortense Belhôte, Gérald Kurdian & Marcela Santander Corvalán
Sound creation Gérald Kurdian
Production, touring, administration Fabrik Cassiopée – Manon Crochemore & Manon Joly

 

Executive production Fabrik Cassiopée
Coproduction La Pop, incubateur artistique et citoyen - Paris (FR) / La Manufacture CDCN Nouvelle-Aquitaine Bordeaux · La Rochelle / L'échangeur - CDCN Hauts-de-France

 

The "Concha" or the Conch, is a large shell that can be found on beaches all over the world. Its cavity, emptied of its underwater occupant, becomes a natural sound box. If you put it in your ear, you can "hear the sea", as they say. But on the five continents, the conch is also considered to be one of the oldest musical instruments. It is a member of the wind family, increases the breath and produces a muffled sound, halfway between the human voice and the aquatic vibration. In Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, "concha" is otherwise a slang word for a vagina. The "Concha de tu madre" is therefore an insult or an exclamation of displeasure comparable to our "Whore! ».

 

The Concha is the common thread of our vast non-exhaustive archaeology of listening through time and space. It allows us to explore both the depths of Western culture and to contradict it. At the same time transmitter and receiver, it forces us above all to consider a third voice, between the passive and the active, curiously carried by the feminine gender. From a pretext object, the "concha" becomes an allegory and a magical symbol of a new world, willingly ecologist, futurist and feminist. It guides our journey, from Rome to Kanaky, from the minaret to our sofa, from Idir to Greuze, from Mondrian to Nikolais, from deep listening to chillwave.

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BOCAS DE ORO

 

CREATION ON OCTOBER 6TH 2022 AT LA MANUFACTURE CDCN NOUVELLE-AQUITAINE · BORDEAUX

 

Choreography Marcela Santander Corvalán
Created in collaboration and performed by Bettina Blanc Penther, Erwan Ha Kyoon Larcher, Luara Learth Moreira, Marcela Santander Corvalán
Artistic collaboration Carolina Mendonça
Music creation Gérald Kurdian
Sound creation Vanessa Court
Light and space Leticia Skrycky
Costumes Marine Peyraud
Production, distribution, administration Fabrik Cassiopée – Manon Crochemore & Manon Joly

 

Executive production Mano Azul
Coproduction La Manufacture CDCN Nouvelle-Aquitaine Bordeaux · La Rochelle (FR), Théâtre de Vanves (FR), Le Dancing CDCN Dijon (FR), La Briqueterie, CDCN du Val de Marne (FR) dans le cadre de l’accueil-studio, La place de la danse, CDCN Toulouse Occitanie (FR), Atelier 210 Bruxelles (BE), Charleroi Danse (BE), Scène nationale d’Orléans (FR), CN D – Pantin (FR)
With the help of DRAC Ile-de-France, dans le cadre de l'aide à la création chorégraphique
With the support of NAVE – Centro de creación y residencia – Santiago du Chili dans le cadre du réseau de coopération Tacto (CL)

 

Bocas de Oro was born from a sound memory.
A memory that stayed in my head for weeks.
An incessant and troubled percussion.
Then, a mythology came to embrace this sound: the one of the door of the sun in the pre-Inca civilization of Tiwanaku on the site of Kalasasaya* in Bolivia.
Between the ruins and the stones of this millenary door, there would be a secret which would make it possible to save humanity in danger at the time of the end of the world.
What would this mystery be made of?
How to travel in time and space to listen to these stones? How to reconstruct, invent and touch these collective practices? 

Bocas de Oro is imagined as an impure territory with bodies that travel in time through fiction, crossed in dance and voice by ancient memories and multiple technologies. We create practices of caring, proximity, listening and interdependence. Being close to each other, with our desires and memories, as a need to strike to imagine together this possible future. 

* This pre-Inca people existed from 500 BC until the 15th century in the southwest of Lake Titicaca, now Bolivia. However before the Spanish colonization, this civilization spread in the current Bolivia as well as in the north of Chile, south of Peru and west of Argentina.