FROM VOICE, A BODY

A show by Leonor Leal based on dialogue with retired dancers

Premiere in 2025

The practice of dance is full of tangible materials for our body, words that resonated one day in our learning and changed our vision; lines of light, lines on the floor, in sound, on the skin, ideas, sensations, temporal parameters, silences, gestures, prayers, invocations to other bodies, melodies, patches and even complete conversations in the solitude of our body of this art that has always been silent outside. Internally, we dancers are full of almost non-transferable and totally personal choreographic notations loaded with great value, a body philosophy and a knowledge that we only recognize when we need to put it into words.

What would it be like if we could talk and dance about all this on stage? All this dance knowledge that is so concrete, but at the same time so rich, so complex and so full of images. 

And beyond the dance itself… What are the doubts that have flooded a stage of an artistic career? The desires, the journeys, the frustration or the love imprinted in the choreographies. What do we really dance?

DE VOZ, UN CUERPO is a show that was born from research and dialogue with flamenco dancers who have already retired.

It all started in 2019, when, as a result of the work for El lenguaje de las línea (danced lecture), I realized that there were very few texts written by flamenco dancers, and I'm not referring to dance treatises or biographies. I'm referring to the fact that there are few bodies that have published from their internal images, from their personal notes that helped them dance better. 

This is how I feel the need to reflect on my own practice in order to do something with it on a stage level, turning these meditations into creative material. And not just my own. Also those of others who danced before me and much more than me. I want to trace genealogical lines of the body that dances, of the body of these women with mine and I want to talk about flamenco itself as a tool that we use to face the world. 

This piece is close to a personal diary, to shared and danced meditations and, of course, to a creative documentary. I dance alone on stage accompanied by fragments of interviews with great dancers, flamenco masters for me. I speak with and from them and try to draw a constellation made of scraps between them all. Scraps of anecdotes, mends and scars. 

Leonor Leal

This show can be accompanied by parallel Actions and Materials:

  • Conversations and texts
    This project has involved a commitment to parallel actions in the form of a constellation. Texts, compilations both personal and from the archive, whose editing and publication are moving, like the stage piece, towards a release in 2025. Based on these texts, a meeting with the public is proposed to provide further information and to discuss after the performance.
  • Dance workshop based on the collected materials
    Based on the interviews, a flamenco dance workshop taught by Leonor Leal is proposed to put into practice the knowledge presented in the interviews. 
  • Embroidery Exhibition: Pocket dances
    As a poetic action, Leonor has proposed embroidering interesting and abstract aspects on scarves from interviews with retired women. A kind of emotional maps have been drawn, in this case, created by the illustrator Raúl Guridi. From these drawings, a group of women from different towns in Andalusia meet to embroider them, comment on them and also talk about themselves. These scarves are part of an exhibition around the piece, which can be displayed if the theatre or space is interested.

Artistic file:

Original idea, research and dance: Leonor Leal
Collaboration with Management: Maria Munoz (Malpelo) 
Accompaniment in staging: Leo Castro and Carmen Mori
Musical creation: Canito (guitar), Antonio Moreno (percussion), Javier Rivera (vocals)
Sound space and sound treatment: Fanny Thollot 
Comments and support in different stages of documentation: Victoria Perez Royo and Pedro G. Romero
Handkerchief design: Guridi 
Lighting design: Carmen Mori 
Sound: Manu Meñaca
Styling: Ana Nieto
Production: Leonor Leal and Isabel Jimenez

Research Support:

Production support for the stage show: