The autumn performance programme in the Community of Madrid has two cannot-miss events that have found a collaborative method that will undoubtedly bear some really good fruit. And it’s actually already happening. Since last year, the Muestra de Creación Escénica SURGE MADRID, along with the Artistic Direction of the Festival de Otoño, started up a section dedicated exclusively to works by new companies and creators. To maximise the social function that Madrid’s big and small venues and halls have in creating first opportunities, SURGE MADRID opened the doors to seven works that will be shown to the public in a single session. At Festival de Otoño, we suggested Carmen Werner and Carlos Sarrió, well-established Madrid creators linked to the fabric of venues, who picked two of the seven to take part in a one-and-a-half-year artistic accompaniment, the outcome of which can be seen at this year’s festival. One of the proposals selected was by Julia Nicolau.

Julia Nicolau is another Madrid artist with roots in Alicante who dances, acts, sings and plays the flute. Y todavía somos is – explained in her own words – ‘movement, articulation and pause’, three items that ‘uphold the choreology of this piece and let me approach this de-subjectification, this silence and this encounter with old age.’ Because Y todavía somos researches how people’s bodily wear and tear from the passage of time makes the body’s articulatory potential disappear. It is presented as a physical theatre piece in which Nicolau has employed all the tools at her disposal as an artist: music and movement, through a loop station with which she records and plays the music that is executed live and her own voice; word and body, and word as music from real testimonies converted into a melody over which she constructs her dance.