Roberto Olivan delves into inner truths with very different dancers

A dancer with gypsy roots whose vision of flamenco goes further, a dancer with achondroplasia (a disease known as dwarfism), a performer who is just starting his professional career and Roberto Olivan himself, with all his career and background. Those are the human elements – a reflection of the social plurality outside the canons – with which he has Goldthe new from the choreographer from Tortosa that has been developing throughout the pandemic and that wants to be a reflection on the richness of diversity, on the authentic and the genuine, on the inner truths, the daily normalities “and the gold -the light- that we all carry inside and that sometimes it is difficult to perceive in oneself or in others”.

Milanese Riccardo Nova creates the music from the poem ‘Mahabharata’ in Sanskrit and his knowledge of Hindu mythology

The Milanese composer Riccardo Nova is based on the poem Mahabharata (the longest in Sanskrit) and his knowledge of Hindu mythology to create the music for this piece. “Roberto wanted to make a trip from the era of gold and purity to the current decadence, and said poem precisely indicates that beginning of decadence,” explains the musician. The beginning of a collapse that humanity is experiencing today and from which it would resurface, according to ancient texts, in another more empathic era. This would be one of the possible reading layers of Goldsays the choreographer.

Sanskrit having a quantitative meter, long and short syllables are inspiring for a composer, as it has a complex rhythmic structure. Riccardo Nova traveled to Deltebre, where Olivan has his company, Roberto Olivan Performing Arts, and his dance festival / international course that has been held since 2004. And where he promotes the Obrador Espai de Creació, a space for the creation of the arts of movement.

There he worked on that rhythmic structure with the dancers, which has nothing to do with the classic Western four-four. Well, Sanskrit comes from the recitative of the Vedic, who to reinforce memory in an oral culture, developed, as Nova explains, a technique of permutation of syllables in their way of reciting texts.

The good news is that this Indian musical composition with guitar and electronic percussion will be performed at the Mercat by an Italian ensemble, Icarus, thanks to the help of the Institut de Cultura Italià. “We will have the musicians live, which is an honor, for which the scenic elements are minimized,” explains Olivan. “The assembly is somewhat austere: there are only three small sculptures with a kind of mirror, and some wooden blocks. That is, people, light and sound, that’s it. Sylvia Kuchinow has done the stage work for us in which the reflections are a metaphor for the idea that all is not gold that glitters”.

We should stop talking about inclusive work in dance and say that we do work with dancers, period”

Robert OliveDancer and choreographer

The themes of the invasion of technology, unity, diversity, exclusion, acceptance and coexistence… -“that we should stop talking about inclusive work in dance and say that we do work with dancers, period”, Olivan stresses- are present in the piece, but not literally. That is to say, the performers play at doing joint actions but they also have their own particular world, but it is not something that is explained in an obvious way.

“I like to defend a piece because of its physicality,” adds the Catalan dancer and choreographer whose training includes the PARTS school in Brussels and a period in the Rosas de Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker company. “I have been interested in presenting a concept and that the result is derived from the filters that the interpreters have presented on that subject, in their opinion. It is a work that can be interpreted in many ways,” he concludes.

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Patricia PerezBarcelona