Zona-Cuerpo or Inner Search

By Irina Echarry, photos: Caridad

HAVANA TIMES, March 20 – Anyone would think it redundant to speak of the body or movement when it comes to a dance group.  However, Zona-Cuerpo —the most recent premiere by the Danza Combinatoria troupe— shows our human bodies to be paths to freedom.

Red lights, bodies moving slowly, almost crawling, they mix with each other, gradually leaving their scanty clothes to one side until they are nude.  In getting to this point, the dancers have exhibited their panic, their loneliness, their anguish.  Likewise, sexual frustration and natural eroticism have been exposed without reserve, sometimes causing repulsion among certain audiences more accustomed to masks.

This is a work that seeps into in the sensations…into the most primary emotions of human beings to counteract the falsehoods and daily hypocrisy that modern society imposes on us.

A fundamental part of the performance is the music of the duo Karma and percussionist Franqui Corbea.  The musicians seem to be in total harmony with the idea, reflecting feelings through the santur, maracas, a flute, a kalimba, a guitar, or simple and beautiful vocalizations.  At the same time they use other acoustic resources, like the ripping of paper or the dragging of a sandal.

On Sunday 14, following the function, the artists had an exchange with the public. Ramiro Guerra, a pioneer of modern dance in Cuba, admitted to being “sonorously and visually hypnotized, the group seeks a tranquility that ultimately does not exist anywhere in the world.”

A young expert in the work of the company recognized that director Rosario Cardenas is an heiress of the creations of Lezama Lima, whose book Dador contained the eroticism that characterized her choreographies.

He added, “Ever since the world has existed the questions have been the same, as have been the answers given by the same people.  In this case a question would be: Do people have the right to the search for their happiness?  The answers are given by the timorous or the transgressors. Those who pass into posterity are the seconds.”

A psychologist and member of the Teatro Espontáneo troupe said, “If I responded rationally I could say pretty and abstract words, but that would not define what happened to me when seeing this work. I felt deeply: anguish, human evolution, basic human conflicts.  I felt like crying.  I associated many things with my life.  In short, I identified with it.”

With the happiness of reaching the public and expressing their emotions, last weekend Danza Combinatoria presented Zona-Cuerpo, awork that causes reflections like these: “Our sexuality should not respond to a society but to biology.  Seeing the work confronted me with the height of horror, the objective is to remove everything dirty and obscure by way of the body.”

Thanks to the music and the elasticity of the dancers, everybody who saw or felt the work left the theater convinced that Danza Combinatoria will never disappoint its public.

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