2012 NÎMES FLAMENCO FESTIVAL. ISRAEL GALVÁN, 'LA CURVA'
“La mort c'est le public”
Silvia Calado. Nîmes, January 19th, 2012
'La curva'. Israel Galván: baile, choreography. Inés Bacán: cante. Sylvie Courvoisier: piano, composition. Bobote: compás. Théâtre. Nîmes (France), January 19th, 2012. 8 p.m.
The audience. Israel Galván zeroes in on it. He says that death, that death is the audience. But what was seen and felt yesterday by the crowd of the Nîmes Théâtre also situates the audience in the plane of life. Before the artist, who comes after triumphing for six nights in Paris, the city’s main theater was bubbling over in a special way. Amidst the red seats, the murmuring and hustle and bustle with the theater’s lights still on announced something unusual. And when they went out, still without anybody up on stage, without anything happening, it burst out in applause straight away. The stage light hushed them, revealing four characters with their backs turned, framed in a bland, anonymous, old, neglected space. With the scene totally bare, without velvet covering the rough concrete in the background, or the cables, or the remains of forgotten props, or the door to the backroom. Just any space in just any forgotten place, very far away from the glamour of the theater. A space to decontextualize, which is one of the key words in 'La curva'. That and others like fragmentation, tension, dialogue, questioning, destructuring...
Before this audience, the French one, which he also kills in order to bring it to life, Israel Galván called up his strange taxi. And he went on a trip of intensities, spins, angles, flights... without a definite destination, without a recognizable landscape. “Taxi!” And at the same time, taking ones of their own were cantaora Inés Bacán and pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, the front and back of the same leaf of marked, intricate veins. One, a totem of mighty stillness, carried her voice towards her guts, guiding herself by the bare blows of her open hand. The other, deconfiguring sounds, breathing out parallel feelings in the end. And Bobote, as the chauffeur. And from one to the other, with one and the other, between one and the other, the bailaor snapped off his odd dancing full of roots and futuribles, of mysteries and precisions, situated at the limit of a curve always about to become destabilized. And the crowd felt that vertigo and that being on the verge of falling and, perhaps, that responsibility in the death and in the rebirth of an artist. And it applauded with fury and rhythm and cries. C'est la mort... ou c'est la vie?
Israel Galván, Sylvie Courvoisier and Bobote
(Photo Daniel
Muñoz) |
Photo gallery, by Daniel Muñoz.
Israel Galván, 'La curva'
More information, audio, orders