ÍDEM 2022. International Performing Arts Festival
The tenth edition of IDEM, the International Performing Arts Festival, features international works with a social and political impact, addressing themes such as caregiving, community, the sensory world, journeying, disability, and the meeting between bodies and their attitudes.
ÍDEM, the International Performing Arts Festival, is one of La Casa Encendida's emblematic events, held annually in September. The festival is a direct and evolved descendant of the Festival of Performing Arts and Disability that was held between 2002 and 2013, and which was a pioneer in its genre, contributing to the expansion and professionalisation of artists and creators with functional diversity.
In tune with the evolution over the past twenty years of the approaches and concepts of diversity and accessibility, ÍDEM was born in 2013 with a new name (a Latin word meaning "equal" and evoking a common European language) with the aim of addressing diversity in all its senses: without labels, with a broader working area (not focusing on disability alone) and all kinds of disciplines, formats and languages.
Throughout its ten editions, ÍDEM has presented the work of national and international artists who share their vigorous dedication to activism and a commitment to contemporary problems: geopolitical justice and economics, colonisation and decolonisation, political asylum, mental illness, caregiving, diversity and inclusion. From different perspectives, ÍDEM invites us to relocate our position as spectators and to refine our gaze in order to reconnect with the essential commitment of art: its transformative capacity.
ÍDEM aims to encourage citizens to engage with diversity through artistic creation. Art should not be merely presented to spectators. It should be experienced, which is precisely what ÍDEM sets out to achieve.
In its tenth edition, the festival uses different formats —performance, installation, workshop, video, documentary, dance and object theatre— to create a space for listening and caregiving, promoting reflection between citizens, audiences and artists from Brazil, Zimbabwe, Argentina, Uruguay, Belgium, Chile, Italy, Austria and Spain.
Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade, who represented Brazil at the Venice Biennale this year, and nora chipaumire (Zimbabwe) open the festival with two video installations never previously seen in Spain. Olho da Rua [Out Loud] filmed in just two days and featuring a hundred homeless people, offers a powerful testimony of contemporary Brazil, with its rich multiculturalism and structural inequalities. And Arias Nehanda addresses the effects and dynamics of colonisation.
nora chipaumire has been taking part in the festival since 2019, when her dance spectacle #PUNK received its first showing in Madrid. In the 2020 edition of the festival she held two online encounters, one with Swiss creator Milo Rau and the other with the ÍDEM curator Marisa Llull. In 2021 La Casa Encendida and Arts Center Vooruit (Belgium) co-produced the radio opera Nehanda, which was broadcast in episodes on La Casa Encendida Radio. And this year, 2022, the artist will make her final contribution to the festival with the video installation Arias Nehanda.
ÍDEM 2022 hosts the premiere of Mejor que saludarse con los codos [Better than Bumping Elbows]. Performance creator Fernando Rubio and researcher Alfredo Ramos rebel against the place occupied by touch in the hierarchy of the senses and present their brand new performative installation, preceded by a multidisciplinary creative workshop. Both events revolve around seven bathtubs that create a meeting point for talking about touch and skin.
Also receiving its first showing in Spain is Third Act, by Mieke Struyve and Lotte Stoops (Belgium), a documentary where Peeping Tom —one of the leading dance companies on the international scene— gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse of their projects Vader, Moeder and Kind, which address the themes of ageing and family.
A dance in danger of extinction
The festival also features the workshop and performance Save the Last Dance for Me by visual artist Alessandro Siarroni (Italy). The piece revisits and retrieves an ancient tradition in danger of extinction: polka chinata, a courtship dance performed by men only that originated in the early 1900s in Bologna. In 2018 it was practised by only five people in the world.
La Merce (Chile) presents Paseo para rastreras, reptiles y sinuosas [Walk for Creepers, Reptiles and Winders], a performance they have choreographed through the different spaces of La Casa Encendida. As they move or journey through the centre, they cast spells in a clear desire to challenge hegemonic power.
The programme includes other proposals such as the presentation of Monnula, muñecas que migran [Monnula, Dolls that Migrate], by choreographer and visual artist Tamara Cubas (Uruguay). The project features dolls handmade by women from the Comcaác community, in Punta Chueca (Mexico), and their travel journals. Each doll embarks on a journey through the world to an uncertain destination, and each participant has the opportunity to act as temporary host at the doll’s first stop and choose the next destination. A collective performance of gestures and shared maps, Monnula attempts to create connections between worlds and peoples.
Throughout the festival La Casa Encendida Radio will broadcast the caregiving sound archive, a series of podcasts with oral testimonies about the experiences of those who look after severely dependent people. The project was developed by Marta Fernández Calvo and Daniela Ruiz Moreno (Spain).
The programme continues with performer and choreographer Michael Turinsky, who brings the Spanish premiere of Precarious Moves, winner of Austria's Nestroy Theatre Prize in 2021. A solo performance about the body and its mobility, the piece addresses how to approach others without reservation and continues Turinsky's investigation into bodies labelled as “disabled”, how such bodies engage with the world, their relationship with time and rhythm, affection and the production of affection, gender and sexuality, and visibility and invisibility.
Turning full circle, ÍDEM ends as it began, with the workshop Fotopalabra: juegos, actos y gestos [PhotoWord: Games, Acts and Gestures] by Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade, who closes the festival with his video installation Olho da Rua at an encounter with the public.
The festival is curated by Marisa Lull.
With the support of: Italian Ministry of Culture
In collaboration with: Fundación ONCE.
