El lugar de los pasos perdidos [The Place of the Lost Steps], by Mónica Valenciano

There is a place in memory where past steps echo in the present,

a potential space where presence happens as a place of appearance.

Something emerges in that rhythmic story... Between the steps that time suspends,

the body is carried forward by what it bears, a polyphony of voices in the voice.

There, where a call plays in us, we hear the burning tongue,

the question in ruins dances its loss...

emergences from a time we simultaneously ignore.

And the occasion sang: among it all thirst barks in the saliva...

the melody struggled to issue three notes and a blinder in the voice...

it hurts far away here, the other side of the offered gesture.

Among it all thirst trembles in a hole,

moving accents in full light it listens

where the skeleton buries its roots...

What does your silence taste of now?

With the mouth open... the curiosity of the wild body and

its watering hole of absences after the tongue,

the question never becomes a nest

what blows crosses the open sky,

revealing the oldest transparency

the eyes of that night grazed,

in barely a moment the forest spat.

Even the image counts seeds... steps of a crowd

in the deepness of the scratch.

What do the dead talk about...

what you don’t know takes its first steps,

on the floor of another voice,

dance...

It’s time for what?

Mónica Valenciano, winner of the Creation category of the National Dance Prize in 2012. She dances... like someone excavating her body, de-obstructing, opening up new circuits to allow us to listen to her voice, exploring through corpo-graphic writing—the respiration of movement—the acoustics of the gesture—the multifocality of the body—the body unfolding in its polyphony and relational possibilities.

Witnessing the discovery of textures, tonalities, attributes and qualities that emerge from the vision of rehearsal as a continual process of development.

It occurs through the very practice of capturing, in listening to the body-movement like an instrument and echo chamber, to the formulation of a language that doesn't try to explain anything but rather to engage us, to beckon us, by cultivating a state of presence that echoes intimately through the spectator.

Valenciano explores the ability to occupy any space—to learn how to accompany time—to free the voice from the body hidden in the body that dances—to be in the air of any movement. Getting better and better at disappearing to allow something to appear becomes the essential movement.

Her recent works are:

Es luna llena en la cicatriz, in collaboration with the visual artist Elena del Ribero and curated by Mateo Feijoo.

El lugar de los pasos perdidos, Centro de la Imagen (La Virreina), Barcelona, in collaboration with the visual artist Inmaculada Salinas.

Show and artist information:

Corpography and performance: Mónica Valenciano

Fragment of music: Bach “Sonata No. 9 in A Major for Violin and Piano, Op. 47”

Lighting design: Cristina Libertad

Accompaniment: Raquel Sánchez, Cristina Carroquino, Chefer Cuneo, María Escobar and Marta Blanco

Residency space: Espacio en Blanco and La Casa Encendida, Teatro Ensalle (Vigo) and Casa Vella (Ourense)

Performance at TEA, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, on 14 October.