BEKRISTEN /// TRÍPTICO DE LA PROSPERIDAD

The almost three-hour performance by La Phármaco will not fail to impress. It promises to be truly unforgettable. Luz Arcas puts the finishing touch to the BEKRISTEN /// TRÍPTICO DE LA PROSPERIDAD triptych and showcases it in its entirety at the Festival de Otoño. La domesticación premiered at the Teatros del Canal in 2019 and Somos la guerra premiered at Conde Duque in 2021. It concludes with the third installment, La buena obra, which has its world premiere at this year’s Festival. It cements the close relationship between La Phármaco and the Festival de Otoño, which co-produced and premiered in 2020 her successful show Toná.

She explored poetic patrimony of southern Spain in Tonáand Mariana . Luz worked extensively on a folk musical and dance tradition typical of Malaga. This triptych, which looks less to the past and focuses on the future, is on Luz Arcas' contribution to the future of culture. Bekristen means Christians in fang, a language of wider communication that originated in Equatorial Guinea (the former-Spanish colony where the piece is set), Cameroon, and Gabon. It is Equatorial Guinea’s largest ethnic language. It refers to the economic-spiritual nature of any imperialist project, sustained on a confusing strategy of combination between macroeconomic objectives and daily cultural rituals. As demonstrated by Christianity and capitalism, which so often go hand in hand, the brutally imposed proselytisation which was presented as a path to salvation, is at the heart of any colonialist’s darkness. The colonialist overtones continue today with neo-colonialism: financial control.

Luz Arca keeps all this in mind with her critical piece. It is a political animal, but it is given back to us poetically on stage, with the power enraptured in the body, image, the organic, and the music. In Bekristen she has been the choreographer, playwright, set and costume designer, and dances with a group of powerful performers amidst the mystical, folkloric, and electronic sound haze that Le Parody's music brings to the ensemble. The stage is structured around the Garden of Eden and continues with evangelical overtones and ends in the apocalyptic.

La domesticación is a still life that exudes exuberance. Flesh, fruit, vegetable, sex, young bodies, preverbal impulses, before God, before languages, before verbs. Bekristen puts forward a unique look at the world: that of a free body. A pagan and primitive festival where socialisation is an atavistic necessity, inherent to the human condition, amoral and savage. These bodies have very different origins and relate to each other without method, without a plan, as if given to an antediluvian instinct and generating an indomitable energy. The performance is a resounding cultural clash woven to perfection.

If La domesticación is the fruit, is the powerful germinating sprout, is the fresh meat, Somos la guerra is sweat and tears, is water, is the dissolution of that first instinct in work. Work is to capitalism what prayer is to Christianity: a way to ensure paradise, promotion, success, but with sorrow and pain as well. Against over-intellectualisation, the show proposes a rebellion through dance, the finding of its own rhythm, with forms specific to dance above and beyond homogenisation, with hybridity. A broken piece, an apocryphal gospel written with the first words of the world, now that the Word has arrived, and God has been anthropomorphised. An unofficial account based on the Biblical of the Birth of Jesus Foretold to the Resurrection.

Finally, the last piece of the triptych La buena obra is being showcased at this year’s Festival de Otoño. Luz Arcas defines it as a "visual prophecy about obsolescence". The poetics of fire, which leaves behind ashes, residues. The obsolescence of the forcibly expired objects that will outlive us as garbage, what remains after the body. Useless objects and data negativity impacting our landfill planet. A concerned look at a future made of the residue of life. A lament turned into resistance.