La Phármaco
www.lapharmaco.com
| Choreographed and performed by: | Luz Arcas |
| Music composed and performed by: | Carlos González |
| Lighting: | Jorge Colomer |
| Costume design: | Heridadegato |
| Set design: | Ana Montes |
| Photography: | Javier Suárez |
| Graphic Design: | Brigada Estudio |
| Video: | Virginia Rota |
| Press and communication: | Cultproject |
| Production and distribution: | Sofía Manrique / La Phármaco |
| Dramaturgy and Direction: | Luz Arcas y Abraham Gragera |
| With the collaboration of: | Associazione Omfrhida, Canal Dance Centre, Community of Madrid and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports |
‘Looking at everything with the eyes of someone who didn’t expect or need the world’. This is how the company La Phármaco introduces its latest creation’s leit motiv, in which it explores the mysteries of the controversial character that gives name to the play: Kaspar Hauser, known as ‘Europe’s orphan’. La Phármaco, one of our country’s most promising modern dance companies, leaded by choreographer and dancer Luz Arcas, lands in March at the Black Room (Sala Negra) of the Teatros del Canal presenting Kaspar Hauser. El huérfano de Europa (Kaspar Hauser. Europe’s Orphan), a physical show that dialogues with History to reflect our time, dancing the ‘human poetic and wild nature’, as the company itself assures.
On May 26th 1828 a strange young man appeared from nowhere in a Nuremberg square hardly able to keep on his feet. The boy, who carried no more than an anonymous and confusing and letter with incoherent facts about his story, was immediately received by the city and by the country as a social, political and philosophical experiment. After six weeks, he could speak fairly fluidly and could also read and write. The boy himself said that he had lived in a dungeon and that he hadn’t met a single human being until the moment he was found.
The doctors resolved he wasn’t crazy nor suffered from a further handicap than that caused by his isolation. His learning process was monitored mainly by Anselm von Feuerbach, who left record of his peculiar intelligence: with a special sensitivity towards painting and horse riding, with a passion for reading and music, Kaspar never resolved who was at the other side in mirrors, neither did he manage to assimilate the idea of an only God, he also felt repelled from Christian images and hated Latin, he didn’t distinguish between dreamed and lived experiences and attributed a will to every inanimate being.
And though his real origin could never be proven, Feuerbach believed Kaspar was the eldest son of one of the lines of the house of Baden, who had tried to get rid of him for someone else to take his place. His confinement would have then been the only alternative to death. Kaspar died murdered in strange circumstances on December 17th, 1833. His tombstone reads: ‘Here lies Kaspar Hauser, an enigma of his time. His birth is unknown, his death a mystery’.
The company explains its creation in the following way: ‘in Kaspar Hauser’s dance, the drive for movement is always tragic. We imagine his peculiar textures born from an extreme sensitivity, from a physical, anatomic reaction against what is real (Kaspar couldn’t stand light, he was able to see in the dark, he perceived the magnetic force of metals, animals and persons, and was hurt by most aromas, sounds and flavours)’. And they add: ‘our character suffered from strong nervous breakdowns when something happened disrupting his precarious stability (a new word, an unknown person or smell for instance) and his limbs could remain congested for days: his body tended to asymmetry’.
But Kaspar Hauser embodies the natural conflict with otherness, which means dancing the implacable violence of the world with the intact nature of ‘Europe’s orphan’, as the media of his time called him. The world premiere of KasparHauser: Europe’s Orphan will take place in the Black Room (Sala Negra) of the Teatros del Canal during the month of March 2016, brought by the 33rd edition of the Festival de Otoño a Primavera.