Envoltura, historia y síncope

138 x 210 mm
112 pages
Design: Setanta

On July 18, 1936, in Bayonne, upon hearing the news of the military uprising, Spanish dancer and bailaora Antonia Mercé y Luque, known as La Argentina, in a tragic synchrony with the Spanish Second Republic, suffers a syncope and dies. She was 46 years old. History shatters, and so does the artist.

Isabel de Naverán, in close dialogue with images, chases the echo of that blow, an individual convulsion that symbolically encapsulates the collective pain that was imminent. This pain has reverberated at different times and in different ways through other artists, some seemingly distant, like Japanese dancer Kazuo Ohno, who felt the need to revisit his dance fifty years after seeing her perform, Takao Kawaguchi, flamenco dancer Rocío Molina, and writer Gertrude Stein.

Envoltura, historia y síncope is not a biography of Antonia Mercé, though it cannot (nor does it want to) escape her. Her magnetic figure structures this essay, which delves into the choreographic and artistic transmission of collective memory — every body in dance reveals not just a cultural heritage but, above all, the present that affects it. Yet the author seeks to distance herself from that iconic attraction, from the fascination embedded in Mercé’s name and dance, to propose an emotional journey that explores how movement is transferred from one body to another. “To dance is always to dance other bodies,” she assures, to repeat and, at the same time, to make oneself present in the difference, to be able to internalize the movements of others, to allow oneself to be permeated. This extraordinary ability linked La Argentina to other contemporaries, like Federico García Lorca. Both were active listeners of other bodies, and both suffered in their own the consequences of the horizon that was closing in.

Isabel de Naverán (Getxo, 1976) works on projects that connect art, contemporary choreography, and performance. Her research revolves around time, from her doctoral thesis on the production of cinematic time in expanded choreography to her most recent work, which focuses on body transmission and reexamining the concept of historical time through ephemeral and fleeting practices. In 2010, she co-founded Bulegoa z/b, an art and knowledge office, with Leire Vergara, Miren Jaio, and Beatriz Cavia, where she remained until 2018. She currently works as the curator of live arts at the public activities department of the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), a role she combines with her position as an associate researcher at Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao), where she develops La ola en la mente (2021-23), a proposal for somatic writing as a form of curating.