[2018] What comes from the river

This scenic work links two contemporary dance solos that dialogue to create a duet.  We will approach the concept of territory from the corporal and from the sense of belonging to a place or to the personal history that builds us. 

How memory dialogues between the present and the past? How memories build us?

How can we break the geography of our body to expand the bonds and generate bridges with everything that surrounds us?

Creation, concept and interpretation: Amalia Herrera / Mariana Torres

As a child I listened to the noise of the sea when I slept in the beach house in Uruguay.

When I saw the foam of the sea, I imagined myself in an immense sea dress.

A dress that united many places.

As a child I had the desire to belong but I did not belong.

That thirst has accompanied me throughout my life.

That thirst arises from my own strength to belong to a place.

It is a thirst for one who is in the desert and drinks the last sips of water from a canteen and the thirst returns, and I walk again.”

– Text adaptation of “La Soledad de no pertenecer” by Clarice Lispector (BR)

I feel like a migrant by choice and this idea became clearer during an artistic residency first in Pamplona, ​​Spain and then in Dublin where I worked on the issue of migration. At that time we shared the feeling of how our roots can be mobile, adaptable , go where they want, be soft or strong as water creates its own path.

That search also connected me to many stories of people who have that feeling of a more mobile belonging, associated with different territories and not only the place where we were born. I started from the desire to approach the different geographies that we travel with their diversities  and give visibility to memories that build us as time builds these geographies.

Amalia Herrera

Sometimes, I think my body is made of stories and water

My stories, stories that eventually got wet, disappearing, transforming and transmitting.

Stories that were weaving in multiple directions of the memory.

They are the grandmothers, the parents, the blood brothers and those who do not, the cousins and uncles, they come with the stories of the countryside and travels with the waters that crosses the worlds.

This is how memory hits you. In its way, it breaks you apart and disarms you.

You summon it or when unprepared it will flood you.

The kingdom of my body is infinite, as my desire to be part of the world in which I live. I can not isolate myself. I am not a fact. I am not isolated.

-Mariana Torres