ÍDEM 2021. International Festival of the Performing Arts
The wake of these times creates a space that is permeable to other ways of feeling and perceiving the world: from the perspective of other susceptibilities and other heights, from the point of view of disequilibrium and insurgence. And so, lost in the contradiction between introspection and the need to communicate, we find ourselves in ÍDEM 2021.
Guest artists will arrive from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the island of Guadeloupe (France), Brazil, Finland, Italy and Spain. The ninth edition of the ÍDEM festival begins with four premieres in Spain and two in Madrid.
Run through with lived time, this year’s festival begins on the street, and more specifically in the plaza de Lavapiés, with a street performance by eco-Afrofuturist punk group Fulu Miziki. Hailing from Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Fulu Miziki describe themselves as a band arriving from a future where human beings have made peace with Mother Earth and with themselves. On the basis of this poetic premise, they will offer us a street performance, two concerts charged with high musical and aesthetic voltage and a workshop to create masks and clothing using discarded material.
Next, from Catalonia, comes Sobre la belleza [On Beauty], by the Societat Doctor Alonso company: nine artists of over 70 will offer us a “work of sculpture” which in the absence of movement “constructs space and time” in the context of a tranquil, contemplative and profound piece for the stage. On Saturday, 18 September the audience will have the chance to meet the company during a public get-together after the show.
In the second week of the festival we have, from the island of Guadeloupe and for the first time in Spain, artist Léna Blou. For a whole week she will offer us an Afro-Caribbean dance workshop based on the deep and detailed work of research she has carried out in the course of her professional career.
Léna Blou will focus on the concept of bigidi, which emerges in a land of hurricanes and earthquakes and finally becomes a metaphor for survival: the greater the imbalance, the greater the ability to adapt. The workshop will be rounded off with an event for the participants and the public screening of a documentary about the artist’s career.
In the Screening Room and also online, the veteran Teatro da Vertigem drama company, from São Paulo, Brazil, visits us for the first time to present Marcha a Re, the film of a performance about the necropolitics imposed upon the Brazilian population by the country’s populist regime during the covid pandemic. Marcha a Re vindicates the right to lament the thousands of deaths that have been ignored as a result of the Government’s authoritarian response to the crisis.
The online meeting between artist Artor Jesus Inkerö and researcher Alfredo Ramos will carry us into the terrain of new masculinities, whose representation and forms will be discussed by the speakers. Three videos by Artor Jesus Inkerö will be screened after the meeting: Swole, Bubble and JAB. In these short films, the artist creates spaces that challenge the norm while revealing how language, gestures and other forms of signalling and communication allow or deny access to discourse to specific groups of people, and how these physical patterns of interaction affect Western culture as a whole.
The festival will close with a double encounter with Italian artist Chiara Bersani. First we have Gentle Unicorn, a performance piece in which the artist, with vulnerable yet self-assured gestures, gives birth to her imaginary unicorn, who springs to life from her own body and is constructed on stage, in a spectacle of great beauty that takes place within a process of constant dialogue with the audience. Bersani offers a captivating display in which the artist, and her spectators with her, are transmuted into the mythological animal.
The second encounter is to take place on Sunday, 26 September, at noon. The artist will be joined in conversation by sociologist Mariella Popolla to talk about their fascinating ethnographic research work, carried out in the last two years using the “shadowing” technique.
The festival is inviting you to come and enjoy all its offerings. If you can, don’t hesitate to do so. If you can’t manage all of it, catch what you can, retain those good vibrations of the artists, and then tell us what you think.
Curator: Marisa Lull.
