Cuqui Jerez
| Las ultracosas is a scenic piece created from artist Cuqui Jerez’s laboratory, with Óscar Bueno, Cécile Brousse and Javier Cruz, organised by the Region of Madrid’s 36th Autumn Festival in collaboration with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía |
“I’m interested in creating landscapes in movement, proposing a state of contemplation to the viewer where hypertension, expectation, suspense and emotion all come into play”.Cuqui Jerez
How can tension be produced from a minimum meaning? What will the possible frameworks of significance be to create a suspense that produces tension? The choreographer and performer Cuqui Jerez (Madrid, 1973) joins the bill at the 36th Autumn Festival with a scenic laboratory that the artist has been developing since June with the support of the Region of Madrid and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. This project will conclude in November with the staging ofLas ultracosasin the Sala de Protocolo in the Sabatini Building, where the result of the creative process undertaken throughout the whole laboratory will be displayed.
After working as a performer with various choreographers in Europe in the 1990s, Cuqui Jerez started to develop her own work as a choreographer in 2001. Since then she has created scenic pieces and videos that have been able to be viewed in numerous European and Latin American festivals. Her main activity is creation, but she also participates in various publications and research, curatorial and teaching projects. Jerez is not an everyday choreographer and she has made performance her creative habit. In her work there is no dance, at least not in the classical sense of a body moving around the stage. Her proposals aim to overthrow the categories of artistic disciplines, experimenting with oxymorons, such as the creation of dance pieces without using the body.
Jerez’s work developed in this new scenic laboratory involves creating a poetic space that goes through the curious, the incomplete, the altered, through choreographic scores and landscapes that breathe, where actions are developed and subtle situations produce tension through altering the meaning and where the possibility of stopping being ourselves and of producing new realities can be imagined.
How can the sense of an action, space, object, body be suspended? To put this question into practice, Jerez proposes working from situations of fragmentation, emptiness, expansion, absurdity, interruption, repetition, temporal jumps. That is where the undetermined, suggestion, insinuation, duplicate, curious and uncertainty is explored.
In the laboratory, the creator encompasses practices to observe and find possible mechanisms to produce tension. This idea is approached on different levels: a level of action, an objectual level, a level of image, and a spacial level, in a way which a live installation is created, a performance situation that will take place in a constructed space, a short circuit landscape which inhabits and which interacts with its objects and its also “short circuited” bodies. This is Las ultracosas.