Guatemalan Dance Atlas is an ongoing research that deals with spiritual dance traditions from Guatemala. I am particularly interested in the Torito, a pyrotechnic dance / street game that functions as tribute to an array of saints and is used both within Christian and Mayan syncretic traditions. My aim is to create a new dance, changing the main character “The Bull” to a “Golondrina” a migratory bird, common all over the world, that travels great distances from south to north and back, each year. For this, I developed a choreography based on a series of schemes related to migratory routes, which I use as notation for the score. Music is an important component. In this occasion we worked with Atlarchopa, a medicine song which is part of a healing ritual of the Abkhazians. The song speaks about a girl who is in pain, so they arrange a game for her, where she had to dance at an accelerated pace until she lost her feelings.
Presented in the 6th Ural Biennial in Yekaterinburg, curated by Çağla Ilk, Assaf Kimmel and Misal Adnan Yildiz.
Pyrotechnics - Mikhail Polyansky Dancers - Denis Karagodin and Sergey Rogoznikov
Photographs - Eugen Stuhlmann
