Elena Córdoba
| The old dancer: | Elena Córdoba |
| Creation of visual devices and video: | David Benito |
| Sound creation: | Carlos Gárate |
| Lighting: | Carlos Marquerie |
| Production assistant: | Mar López |
| Wardrobe: | Cecilia Molano |
| Creation of sound device: | Tony Quiroga |
| Sound: | Adolfo García |
| Photography: | Fernando Alves y Miguel Ribeiro Fernandes |
| El nacimiento de la bailarina vieja is a project created with support from the Madrid City Council’s Grants for Creation Programme and a subsidy from the Community of Madrid, in co-production with CITEMOR - Festival de Montemor-o-Velho (Portugal). The piece received further support from Losdedae and the Alcalá de Henares Town Council | |
“The body of the old dancer premieres for prodigies who could never create. However, despite all these contradictions, the old dancer has an advantage over other creatures: she dances to the very limits of her body as part of her own essence.”.Elena Córdoba
The work of dancer and choreographer Elena Córdoba has been seen in prestigious competitions such as Madrid en Danza, Barcelona’s GREC and the Portuguese Citemor festival. There is a reason why she is considered one of the masters of contemporary dance in our city. She started to dance at the young age of seven in the studio of Valentina Kaschuba, Diaghilev’s dancer, and started her career as a dancer alongside choreographer Anatol Yanowsky, to then continue her training as a choreographer and dancer in Paris.
After returning to Madrid in the 90s, she formed part of the generation whose talent flourished around Sala Pradillo and the new stage languages: Olga Mesa, Blanca Calvo, La Ribot, Rodrigo García, Antonio Fernández Lera, Carlos Marquerie… Córdoba has built her oeuvre from a detailed observation of the body, the core and subject matter of her work. In 2008 she started the project Anatomía poética with surgeon Cristóbal Pera. Together, they delved into a journey towards the inside of the human body, through the study of muscles, bones and organs, approaching their movements, functions and spaces. Furthermore, over the course of her intense career, she has worked as a choreographer with the likes of Antonio Fernández Lera, Rodrigo García, Carlos Marquerie, Rocío Molina and Jesús Rubio. She has also worked as a teacher, always seeking different ways of understanding and conveying dance as one of mankind’s fundamental actions.
The production that is now being presented at the Autumn Festival, El nacimiento de la bailarina vieja, is an anatomical fiction that reflects on the passage of time through the body. In the piece, Córdoba fantasises about the idea of a dancer who was born old. Her dance is sketched via flesh that was never powerful and, therefore, there is no melancholy produced by loss and no tension between that which was and is. In the words of the artist herself: ‘the old dancer is a creature with excessive forms who has broken away from the subtlety of anything useful. She is a counterproductive and infertile being, who is not even sure of the difference between the beginning and the end.’ On stage, her movements are surrounded by landscapes that come from a microscopic look at decomposing matter, a process that is methodically controlled to be converted into image and sound, with the aim of showing time as the destroyer and architect of matter.