Estudios elementales

Luz Prado and Jesús Rubio Gamo, artists who search and search, nonconformists with the art they know and love. Luz Prado is in with the crowd from Malaga, which Alberto Cortés and La Chachi also add to. She will perform with Cortés at this year’s Festival as well. Jesús is a regular at the Festival de Otoño, in between the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 in all his splendour with his work El hermoso misterio que nos une, which is an ode to the mobility of the body, to the mobility of thought; to the flow of ideas, of our questions, of the little everyday revelations . They come together in Estudios elementales, a scenic dialogue between dancer and violinist where they share reflections on their expressive arts, music, and dance. They generate a space in which to let themselves go, to be accompanied and to understand in other ways, to approach body and sound beyond the word.

As has happened with other dancers and choreographers such as Elena Córdoba, Carlota Mantecón, Luz Arcas, Rocío Molina and La Chachi, the understanding between Luz Prado’s extraordinary technique and Rubio Gamo’s honest and profound dance is the result of the ethereal encounter in their ways of understanding art. They are both classically trained artists and are fascinated by bringing to the surface and making present this canonical heritage that underlies their artistic disciplines. This is a performance of a primordial act of letting oneself go, of accompanying oneself towards the unknown in search of a certain form of fullness of being. "What we are in terms of what we were," as the violinist defines.

Winner of the Ojo Crítico de Danza Award and the Max al Mejor Espectáculo de Danza Award, both in 2020 for his impressive and unforgettable Gran Bolero , Jesús Rubio Gamo is one of the most outstanding choreographers in Europe today. We don't say so ourselves, but the Red de Danza Aerowaves does, which selected him with 19 other choreographers in 2017 and 2018. This makes his outstandingness more than a statement of fact. Since he started putting together his own pieces in 2008, he has been invited to Paris, Amsterdam, Lima, Athens, London, Arequipa, and Rome. When writing about his artistic practice and his dance concepts, he stated: "it is like wandering through those inner territories of the body to learn about its rhythms and its forms, its humidities. Dancing thus becomes an opportunity to reveal a secret, to make visible the mystery that unites us".

Luz Prado has become one with her violin. Her loving and inquisitive relationship with her instrument has led her to develop a new playing technique. She plays with two bows. She explains: "It implies a subtle and decisive expansion of the violin's sound possibilities: sounding all four strings at the same time, double strings with interspersed strings, subjecting a string to two simultaneous frictions..." Prado identifies herself more as an improviser than as a performer, from tradition to rupture. Her violin is performative. It lets time and space articulate what is going to happen on stage.

After performing together in Elena Córdoba's project Criaturas del desorden (which formed part of the Festival de Otoño 2021), Luz and Jesús knew they wanted to work together. They set out to study the elemental, to explore the symbiotic relationship between sound and movement, music and dance, the metaphysics of touch. His body is her bow. The air is the string and silence is a canvas ready to paint with four hands.