Music is always an important part of the productions by choreographer Asun Noales (Elche, 1972), and given that the choreographer from Elche already had a Rite of Spring on Stravinsky's music behind her, the Institut Valencia de Cultura found it ideal to undertake a dance creation on Death and the Maiden, the penultimate string quartet composed by Franz Schubert and the most famous of his fifteen. Premiered in 2020, the award-winning piece that treasures three MAX stops this weekend -from January 27 to 29- at the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona.
The Viennese romantic had just found out that he was suffering from syphilis, he was fully aware that he was dying, and in this demanding piece that demands from its performers an effort of constant contrasts, he already appealed to existential elements about life and death. He composed it in March 1824 based on the song –a lied- with the same title that he had written seven years earlier with a text by the clergyman Matthias Claudius.
“Schubert is precisely one of my favorite composers, I love the romantic era. And this first lied, Claudius speaks in a very poetic and beautiful way about how to accompany life towards death... that "they don't anticipate that I'm going to accompany you sweetly in my arms". Schubert's emotional charge in returning to that idea in 1924 is intrinsic to the music. And I imagined precisely that sweet death, not that drastic and abrupt death that comes with the scythe, but a more sumptuous death, closer to the body, imperceptible but prowling, like that cat that brushes against you.
Delving into this sublime piece of Romanticism from a contemporary perspective also implies observing this premature transition from one state to another with special urgency. “It is a piece about time and how we perceive it”, points out the artist. The transit of an organic body that emerges with its heartbeat to give way to a faint breath, a caress that will lead to shipwreck and ashes.
“At first I worked with the original string quartet, but I didn't have to accompany her to work, because it was after entering the rehearsal room that the music of Aurora Buazà and Pere Jou [Telemann Rec] on Schubert was generated. They have fostered that sound imaginary that creates an atmosphere for you”, points out Noales. Winner of three MAX awards -for best dance show, best choreography and best lighting design-, the piece was created over three months in 2020 and its premiere took place in the middle of the pandemic, in October, with a 30% capacity at the time when the theaters were opened for the first time in Valencia.
Luis Crespo's stage space is diaphanous and only traversed by a diagonal wall, and a linoleum that acts as a shadow projected on the ground for those walls. The lighting, by Juanjo Llorens, is what leads the viewer to pay attention to one side or the other of the scene through which seven performers move. Why seven?
“At first there were eight but one in the end couldn't, so I played with the notion of a triad of life, that is, three lives and three deaths, as if we were talking about the holy trinity, about the importance of the number three. And then we have the character of the real death, the one who binds and sews the whole work. In fact, the eighth dancer was a cover, I was looking for that odd number”.
The maiden is for Noales a fragile woman, because she is going to die, but at the same time she is a serene and mature woman, because even when she is young she faces a reality from which she has no escape and which she finally accepts and accepts. Two dancers play that maiden, Carmela García and Eila Valls, both trained in their beginnings in Madrid. “They are two very different women, one very organic, she represents the soul of the maiden and if she had to draw it, it would be transparent. The other one has a beautiful body, she is the other part of the duality ”, concludes Noales.
Awarded Arts Escèniques from the Generalitat Valenciana on different occasions, Noales began his career in dance graduating from the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona and working in companies such as Mudances/Àngels Margarit. She has also received the Burgos New York Choreography Award and the Maspalomas Award.
Noales travels this Sunday to the Tanz Biennale in Heidelberg, in Germany, where he dances 'Rito'. Ahead of her now is the centenary of the Alicante painter Eusebi Sempere, a pioneer in all the avant-garde, thanks to which the Alicante Museum of Contemporary Art has been created. “I am going to work a show based on his work. So from this emotional and human content of Schubert I now turn to something much more abstract. I feel comfortable delving into people's stories, I find it fascinating”.
