Instante gradual
The ‘Instante Gradual’ play will take place at the plateau in front of the Serbian National Theatre on 19 November at 7:30 p.m, within the Other? Europe music programme.
“Each moment is two moments. But at which moment does wood change to stone, peat to coal, limestone to marble? The history and the memory share data, time and space. Everything is inside this historical fraction of second, the gradual instant.”
Direction, choreography and interpretation: Kirenia Martínez Acosta
Music: Bruno Baw
Duratión: 00:17´
About the play: interview on kid residency danskolligiet 2021, Malmö, Sweden, by Gwyn Emberton
Can you tell us a little about yourself? Who you are as a person and as a dancer?
I´m funny to some people but sometimes I can’t understand some jokes, maybe it’s because I believe everything that is said to me as if everything could be possible or real. Why not? Everything is possible. This way of understanding everything seems innocent and risky at the same time.
I first studied acting because it was the unique job that I would never get bored with myself. I enjoyed playing games, changing things and always doing something new but when I felt the power of dance I did not need anything more. I think this is what turned me into a dancer.
For the last 20 years I have been dancing, choreographing, directing, and working on artistic projects where dance converses with theatre, art, fashion, poetry, cinema and photography. First I lived in Cuba where I studied and worked with Danza-Teatro Retazos Company and now for the last 16 years I have been in the Northwest of Spain, in Galicia, where dance and direct EntremánsCompany and Kirenia Danza company.
What are you working on with this play?
This residence was planned for 2020 but I had to delay it because I was directing three plays last year. “Gradual instant” is time for me as a dancer in between my company productions. It’s very important work for me to still be dancing and being a dancer.
These years ago I reduced my work as a dancer. I suffered major injuries during my professional dance career, and with my age, limits my body’s performance. I had critical neck surgery in 2018 and doctors suggested that I should stop dancing. I had two options: Leave my dance career or rebuild my body language with my actual physical capacities.
I decided to use this residency, as my 2019 residence on European Capital of Culture of Italian Matera City, to refresh and return to “Gradual Instant” because it has become my tool to check my dancer-body each time I do it.
When a body reaches 20 years of dancing, after they have put all of their attention to life on stage, the technical skills are not the main aspect for movement anymore. Dance is focused on another point. It is not only a physical and aesthetic challenge. It’s more about integrating thought and action at the same time. There are new challenges to create actions, and you must seek new ways and languages. The body wants to dance something new but from its actual state.
Now this is a new first step of a long piece of research for me. I need to listen to my body, take care of it and learn how for it to be free again!
Why is this important to you and to your work at this moment?
This set of questions has been designed to collect answers of dancers and people involved in dance that will help me to connect with you to what I’m developing during international residences. Your answers help me get to know the context and scenario when I am working away from home. At the same time they help me identify best practices or points of views to set benchmarks for me.
What are you going next with Gradual Instant?
I think that ‘Gradual Instant’ will be with me for a long time because it´s a research project about how my body is changing each time that I dance it. We are changing all the time but gradually. I try to discover these natural micro changes because of age and the organic variations of movement that are invisible normally.
Photo: Gwyn Emberton