For several minutes, dim light, whitish, accurate, you don’t hear another sound than the nearly naked bodies in motion. Until Bebe Reasons emerge from the throat of one of the dancers and lights and bodies raze and start a duo at times desperate, sometimes contained, where free passion and desire rule. So does nudity, I infer. Hence the need to look and smell and taste. Then Martica uses Carlos Luis and Carlos Luis hugs her and walk together as well, clinging to the other’s back, out of sight.
Demo-N/Crazy is a work with no ties, no laws. In regard to its content, of course. With choreography of Spanish Rafael Bonachela, Demo-N/Crazy transits from the appalling loneliness to the deafening crowd of images and sounds that continue to communicate. It is a set of relationships between individuals, and is one of the works that will start the tour of Danza Contemporanea de Cuba for several provinces, starting next September 19.
The shows will be integrated well by Mambo ¹ 3XXI and Identity by Cuban George Céspedes, who delves into the roots and feeds the vernacular to reform and deform at will. Cuban rhythms become more electronic and the dancers do not oppose change. They assimilate it slowly, mix it with a bolero and digest it by and for the public.
And then there’s Compass. That monster carefully stitched and made up of Yoruba songs, waltzes, mambos, guarachas, moving rhythmically across the stage of the hand of the dancers, under the jealous eye of Miguel Iglesias. An accurate look from twenty eight years ago.
Contained in a single program Demo-N/Crazy, Mambo 3XXI and Identity – ¹ and Compass in another, Danza Contemporanea de Cuba will dance in Cienfuegos on September 21 and 22, Havana 27, 28 and 29, Bayamo October 1 and 2 , Santiago de Cuba 5 and 6, and Camagüey 9 and 10 of the same month.
They will leave almost immediately on a European tour, to begin the celebrations for the 55 years after its creation. They will premiere several pieces and resume the event “Parallel” for emerging artists or with choreographic concerns. And to make you shake hopelessly while Alberto Gonzalez and Yosmell Calderon dance a flamenco Ne me quittes pas. And after the show ends upside down, resting on the forearms, for a few minutes while you wait, ask, beg, lights out before someone falls.
