The Desbordes project, the recipient of one of the ‘Barcelona 2020 Awards’ grants, is investigating both the human need for evasion and the production of alternative identities as a means of escaping the everyday limits and condition of human emptiness. It characters, opting for excess, artificiality and indulgence, clash with a reality they are unable to contain, in their constant search for fantasy and false reality.
Amaranta Velarde goes in for this excess in a show featuring a pair of performers (Velarde herself and the dancer Guillem Jiménez) adopting kitsch aesthetics reminiscent of the New Romantic movement of the 1980s. This is how the show’s creators reclaim camp, regarded as a love for artifice and exaggeration which, when perceived with the passage of time, reveals the essences of objects and people at their most authentic and least banal.
Desbordes, then, features this intertwining of this camp aesthetic with an exaggerated performativity and an overflowing movement, with the intention of breaking with the principles of nature, harmony and organicity set out under contemporary dance codes and to bring out a different choreographic language on stage, which defies the aesthetic principles themselves and the prejudices of both the artist and the audience. It questions the prevailing aesthetics in contemporary dance which, what is more, adds a principle of otherness that breaks with the definition of good taste and harmony.
Featuring a live sound creation and performance by Juan Cristóbal Saavedra and the involvement, looking outward, of the performer Cris Blanco (also involved in the Grec 2022 with Grandissima illussione), Desbordes is a project created by the choreographer, dancer and educationalist Amaranta Velarde. She was trained at CODARTS (Rotterdam University of the Arts) and worked in the Netherlands until 2011, when she returned to Barcelona and began creating choreographic works such as Lo Natural, Hacia una estética de la buena voluntad, Mix-en-scene (Grec 2017) and Apariciones sonoras (Grec 2020). In addition, she has also collaborated with artists and groups of creators such as the above-mentioned Cris Blanco, El Conde de Torrefiel (who are bringing the Grec 2022 Una imagen interior) and the Polish choreographer Ola Maciejewska. She was a member of the La Poderosa ARTAS collective from 2013 to 2016.
A 2022 Barcelona Grec Festival and Mercat de les Flors co-production.
Supported by La Caldera les Corts, La Poderosa, Centro Coreográfico Canal, Graner centre de creació, Animal a l´esquena, Refugi Escenic Can Clariana and Beques Barcelona Crea.
Conceived and choreographed by: Amaranta Velarde Performed by: Amaranta Velarde, Guillem Jiménez Artistic adviser: Cris Blanco Assistant for movement: Oihana Altube Original music: Juan Cristóbal Saavedra Lighting: Horne Horneman Dramaturgy: Roberto Fratini Costume advice: Sau-Ching Wong Student intern: Vera Palomino Distribution: Ariadna Miquel Photography: Jorge Mirón
