SUPERMEDIUM
NĂșria Guiuâs new work, accompanied in the creation by Norwegian choreographer Ingri Fiksdal, is called Supermedium and is part of the Cell 4 project, produced by Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona (Spain). The piece is a large-format version inspired by Medium, a solo that the two choreographers created in 2022. In the history of dance up to the present day, there are different approaches to the embodiment of the virtual or invisible. Witches or mediums have always been women associated with the fringes of society and superpowers. In Supermedium, nine dancers become mediums who channel movement through time and space, and such be vessels that connect past, future and present times. Through attempts of invocation, possession and finally exorcism of various movement archives, the performance grows into a speculative fiction that examines what kinds of bodily knowledges and histories we are in possession of as well as which bodies are possessed.
During the performance nine female dancers will be channelling movement from their own bodily-affective archives. Each dancer will transcend, mutate and reveal different traces of phantom movements. Movements that have been traveling through different bodies, through generations; maybe from a teacher to a student, from a mother to a daughter, from a video tutorial on the Internet to a viewer. Their bodies become possessed by movements that belong to different times and places. The movements can perhaps be recognized or named by the viewer in a subtle way while they fade, mutate, disappear or transform. Bodies possessed by many bodies. Bodies possessed by history. Bodies possessed by music. Bodies that transit both cultural, personal and virtual history archives during the time and space of the performance.
Direction NĂșria Guiu Sagarra / Choreography NĂșria Guiu with Ingri Fiksdal / Accompaniment Claudia Solwat / Performers Clara Tena, Emma Riba, Mabel Olea, Aina Lanas, Blanca TolsĂ , Anna Calsina, Laura Morales and Berta Pascual / Costume and set design Ronak Moshtaghi / Original light design Phillip Isaksen / Adaptation, design and lighting technician Arnau Sala / Music and sound design Uge Pañeda (Okkre) / Costume assistance Manuel Mateos / Video and photo Tristan-PĂ©rez MartĂn / Production Mercat de les Flors in the framework of CĂL·LULA project
Premiered at Mercat de les Flors 24-28 January 2024
“Both Medium and Supermedium deal with the relationship with the invisible, the virtual. Until recently I have worked on the virtual from the digital medium and technological interfaces such as screens, always as a conceptual framework and as an archive, which has served me to generate a displacement or transfer between contents and bodies. Between effects and affects. In Supermedium (created jointly with Ingri Fiksdal) we talk about what is virtual as a space of invisibility and appearance; of the phantasmagoria that arises when dances, movements, memory and dynamic archives function as a virtuality whose exclusive interface is the medium; the body. Instead of the body we refer to plural bodies, since the virtuality of a movement can come from different places: from everything that has crossed us at a personal level, and from what we have crossed at a cultural level. Also of everything that has sedimented in us from the ghost of other bodies appearing through photography, video, the screen of a mobile phone. ”