Elena Córdoba, an independent choreographer, studied classic and contemporary dance in Madrid and Paris. She has directed works in Madrid since 1989. Her most recent works are Lección de tinieblas (Lesson of Darkness) and Herminia and Ana. Since 2007 she is developing the study and creation of the project entitled Anatomía poética (Poetic Anatomy) paying attention to the different organs, functions or parts of the body in order to study them and build a series of poetic studies about our flesh.
She has received a scholarship from Residencia de Estudiantes (Madrid) and a performing languages research prize at Novi Sad’s INFANT Festival. She has worked as a choreographer for works by Rodrigo García, Carlos Marquerie, Antonio F. Lera and John Romao. Her pedagogical work has run in parallel with her activities as a coreographer.
Expulsadas del paraíso is a study on the hips of the woman and everything they contain: muscles, tendons, entrails, blood pressure, the openings and the settings of fat.
A fable appeared out of this study, on the passing of time through the belly, the first space of the body to rot; the most fertile and fetid place of our body.
Our body, like the body of Eve expelled from Paradise, has fallen on the conscience of our time, where there are not two equal movements, where rhythm is not eternal and does not control the pulse of life, and where every pleasure has the gravity of something which cannot be repeated, where we must use the orifices that open our body to the world in order to keep living, to keep beating. And now that our intestines are so heavy as Eve’s when she crossed the gates of the Garden of Eden, we dance remembering that this body that we inhabit will some day dissolve.
When: Fri, 04/11/2011
Event Times: 7:45pm
Venue: The Cockpit Theatre
Venue Details: Gateforth Street, Marylebone NW8 8EH
PLEASE NOTE: THIS PERFORMANCE CONTAINS NUDITY
The interview!
How would you define yourself?
As a choreographer and a dancer. I readily, and without shadow of a doubt, identify myself with this profession – which has given shape to my life since I was a small child. The body and the movement it makes are the subject matter of my work.
What can the audience expect?
They will have an opportunity to approach the way in which we perceive how the human body moves from the inside.
What do you think your collaboration with Spain NOW! will bring?
I will have the opportunity of presenting my work in London once again; and the opportunity of confronting it with a different society which, perhaps, perceives it in a different way.
Describe or give us some insights about your creative process.
The work we present as part of Spain NOW! 2011 belongs to a project, called Poetical Anatomy, in which I have worked for the last 4 years. Throughout this project, I have studied various body parts & their functions and composed choreographies about each one of them.
Expelled from Eden is a study about women’s hips. The principal characteristic of this work in particular, and of the entire cycle in general is, perhaps, to make visible what we do not see about our own bodies – the make-up of the physical body with everything about it that is fragile, time-constrained and prodigious.
Where have you shown internationally before?
This work was premiered in Citemor 2010, a festival in Montemor-o-Velho (Portugal), who also co-produced it. We have since performed in the city where my work is always anchored, the city of my birth – Madrid.
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Photos by Susana Paiva