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“I wanted to speak of death, to show it, but as it appears in folklore, with all its mythical and psychic force, but also as a reason to feast, as a celebration and catharsis”.

Luz Arcas

Toná is a stage show that eludes conventional narratives and offers the viewer a poetic, artistic and intuitive experience. In this work, bodies and objects (the costumes and props) are pierced by the invisible elements (the music, movement) and shaken until they are exhausted: an excess of life that ends up draining them and returning them to their inert state.

Under the provisional title of La carne, la caída (The flesh, the fall), it premiered last November at the Centro Pompidou in Malaga as a shared creative laboratory between three renowned artists of Málaga who reside in Madrid: dancer and choreographer Luz Arcas, who is also the director of the company La Phármaco; photographer Virginia Rota, a long-time collaborator from the early days of La Phármaco and also an active participant in numerous other stage projects; and violinist and composer Luz Prado, with whom Arcas had already worked in her earlier show La domesticación (Domestication).

Toná delves into the ephemeral nature of things, death and memory. As Luz Arcas states, “the materials that we work with belong to our childhood imagination, our infancy, the songs and fears that still haunt us. Our project explores everything related to death and mourning from folklore, with the noteworthy presence of the Andalusian olive tree as our source of inspiration. It has also been an important deviation from my previous works. It’s less dense, more organic and wild”.

In the words of the artist herself: “Toná emerged from my trips to Málaga to visit my father who was quite ill. In his house, where I passed my childhood, I re-encountered half-forgotten references, icons, symbols. I remembered anecdotes and fears, reconnecting with the folklore of my childhood. I wanted to dance about a feeling that belongs to this folklore: death as a celebration of life, the feasts and individual and collective catharsis.

I was working on a new project with Luz Prado (music) and Virginia Rota (audiovisuals) who are also from Malaga, when I suggested we look into this shared poetry. Luz has worked a lot on the Andalusian olive groves and the Pre-Roman folklore of Malaga, probably Phoenician in origin, which has largely survived successive cultural colonisations and all attempts at domestication. Virginia had just inaugurated an exhibition on mourning in Andalusia.

Collective memory and popular imagination are crucial because they embrace us and save us from individualism by inviting us to build a shared narrative. Like everything related to people, this cultural memory is problematic, nevertheless, to return to it, to dirty it, to rename it and thus revive it, is an act of freedom contrary to cultural totalitarianism or any neo-liberal attempt at imposing and capturing a meaning, that only a collective can perform. It is also an act of resistance against the attempts of our system to exile and negate disease, old age and death, which makes us culturally and spiritually weak, and thus controllable.

In my father’s library I once again encountered a biography of Trinidad Huertas La Cuenca, a 19th-century dancer from Malaga who became famous all over the world with a number where she depicted a female bullfighter in all her glory. This earned earned her the nickname of La Valiente.
I’ve recovered other references from my childhood, such as the figure of La Virgen del Carmen, who is taken out to sea in a procession every 16th July during a festival that, like so many others in the popular world, is a pagan rite and predates Catholicism but has been adapted in order to express its myths. I also remember how a friend of my father took us to see the Virgin appear among the olives at night. I like Pasolini’s take on miracles, as I do that of Ana Mendieta: the metaphysics of flesh, their impoverished gleam, the unexpected witness.

Miracles are made of many things but above all, of the need for them. Their devotional nature doesn’t require a very elaborate formal structure, as my friend Rafael SM Paniagua says: ‘the effectiveness of popular cultural forms is of another type. Its precision is of another type. We can create a belief on the basis of an abject image, a stain on the wall, a badly-painted Christ. Popular devotion emerges around badly-made images’.

I confess that the process of creation has been freeing for me. I hope it’s the same for the viewers.

Toná is dedicated to my mother”.

Practical information

• Teatro de la Abadía Sala Juan de la Cruz
• 13 and 14 November at 19:30
  15 November at 18:30

Full information on the show Ticket sales

Video

What the critics have said...

• “Luz Arcas is a dancer without alliances other than her body and what she elevates, invents, builds and wails with it. Dance is another form of politics, but an intimate politics, that which is not wasted in a sole force but is plastered with many others: poetry, theatre, thought... Because everything moves. This Southern woman’s project is not limited to dancing, it enters and slips through all places where there’s an upheaval, a loss. Dance is necessary. Her dance is necessary. Because it calls for complicity and space without actually asking for anything. Because it sheds light there where occasionally light saves”. Antonio Lucas, El Mundo