How to preserve art forms, how to get from one to another, how (perhaps) to create new ones? What there is is defined in relation to what there was, either by ignoring it, denying it, even repeating it, or just the opposite. An often unstable balance between identity, body, technique and intention; between outside and inside, knowledge and recognition. Four kinds of things come to us from the past: treasures to preserve, rubbish to destroy, ruins to respect as they succumb, and works to continue building without perhaps completing them (note that destruction is rarely processual).

The cenotaph is an empty tomb. A monument to the memory of someone who is no longer there or anywhere else. A memorial erected to a figure and his legacy, to some -illustrious- deceased whose corpse is not found but whose death is assumed with total certainty. A tribute that bids farewell to what is no longer, in order to make room for what may be.

This choreographic project begins as an exercise of typological and methodological formalization, gradual and evolutionary, of Breaking, one that makes it accessible beyond -or amongst- itself and its contexts, that allows, at least instrumentally, its integral and coherent study -and teaching-, and one that, thus, also opens it up to something different, perhaps, from what it has come to be. It explores the relationship between this bodily technique and bodies other than those which originated it, counting with performers untrained in it but adept in others, with particular emphasis on femininity as an anatomical quality and on the structures of contemporary dance as context.  

This piece was a sample of this research process, together with the co-writing and coordination of the textbook “Historia de la Danza III: Danzas Urbanas en España”, published by Mahali press.

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