THE LANGUAGE OF LINES

When you dance and look there, what do you see?

I could have returned the question: And what did you see?

But I didn't do it and I didn't tell what I saw.

Could we dance and think in the form of text? Dance and write at the same time? dance and talk? translate simultaneously?

Our practice 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 ground, in sound, on the skin, ideas, sensations, strange temporal parameters, borrowed nightmares, silences recorded in thirst, indelible gestures, improvised prayers, invocations to other bodies, patches and even complete conversations in our “solitude”. A whole world of non-transferable choreographic notations.

What would it be like if, in addition to dancing, we wrote all this?

There are few texts written by flamenco dancers and I am not referring to dance treatises.

There are few bodies that have published their images, their doubts, their desires, their travels or their love printed in their choreographies, and that doesn't mean they don't exist.

“The Language of Lines” reveals many of these details; in fact, the original title comes from a lecture given by the great dancer Antonia Mercé, La Argentina (1890-1936) at the Salon Santé-Beauté in Paris shortly before she died.

Lines that connect us with her and with our own learning, with our memory and with a map in the sky that continues to guide us. In this conference, we reactivate and traverse our own and other people's materials in a format of choreographic rewritings in the air and on paper.

Scraps of flamenco history to discuss creative processes, personal philosophies, anecdotes and scars.

Leonor Leal