Ensayos para nada y ave - El acontecimiento

Mónica Valenciano presents a performative experience with 22 cards revealed in situ, activating hidden voices of the body that dance within a shared polyphony.


“The acontecimiento or event is hidden folded in the movement between one gesture and another, thus every instant is potentially a door that opens (Pascal Quignard).

Is every living image always changing, looking at you in what you see?  

Active imagination as the faculty to grasp the intimate and secret relationships between things, their correspondences and analogies; meaning is that which dances branched in its very circulation, where images are organised by means of irrational connections.

Through the plot, meaning is not something that is sought, but offered, it happens sometimes from its cracks, responding beyond all expectations.  

True emotion emerges from the most impersonal part of us, so the deeper it goes, the less individual.

That which carries a dance in the rhythm of its breath sings and disseminates, the fecund instant prowls the contact, venturing into the spontaneity of the gesture, experiencing in turn the vision of the journey becoming… 

To train oneself in this temporality of happening is perhaps a question of listening and not of discourse, because the true creative act takes place while listening…

Listening to the breath implies approaching the heart of the game, where space presents itself to the one who walks through it... (Chantal Maillard). 

The multitude of images that is a body, freeing itself in the very propagation, a palpitating becoming transmitted from one to another, a polyphony of meaning.

We then witness moments of that common breathing that we perceive as open intimacy. 

The language of the body is perhaps a manifestation of what is silenced, that which memory drags in its blood, babbling of what is not yet pronounced, half-born... More than saying, it calls.

We dance digging in the body to the reach of its most intimate voice, where deep memory, intuited song and immediate present conjugate dis-interestedly the breath as fleeting, unexpressed event that is given from the invisible to the sensitive; when the instant reaches the presence something has taken hold, it reveals a contact between matter and space that dissolves the form... Now, detached, it becomes a fertile atmosphere.  

Cultivate that state of presence that allows the possibility of letting the arrival of what is happen.

We are, in this way, moved by the space that we in turn create; achieving the necessary readiness for something to happen is almost the essential movement; we collaborate, therefore, with this act of (pro)creation.  

The event, that eternal brevity or instant that overcomes time.

The event itself implies the attainment of an instant of common resonance and song as access to perceptual simultaneity. 

The art of happening happens through a state of presence capable of unfolding in space a visibility that renews the vision.

Cultivate the ability to inhabit any space.  

It emerges from a process of un-hiding that offers itself to the possibility of being in the air of any movement.”

Mónica Valenciano

Mónica Valenciano (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1961) is an important figure of Spanish contemporary dance. She presents an artistic career as solid as it is forceful. She got her starts at the end of the eighties, when her name appeared on the dance scene in Spain together with that of other restless choreographers, protagonists of the contemporary creation of the moment: Ana Buitrago, Olga Mesa, La Ribot and Blanca Calvo, among others.

The creation of her company El Bailadero in 1997 marked a turning point in her creative career, dividing Valenciano's work in two. It was at the head of this company when she started her choreographic series Disparates. Small creative puzzles built through what is instinctive, intimate and immediate, in which language and its use through space and time become very important. Inspired by the darkest, most grotesque part of Goya's work, these Disparates reflect Valenciano's interest in art, the starting point of many of her works. Up! (1989), Punts suspensius (1991), Miniatures (1992) and Adivina en plata (1996-1997) are some of this creator's other works. She studied classical dance, contemporary dance and theatre at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona and the RESAD in Madrid. She also boxes.

Her works have been performed at national and international contemporary performing arts festivals. In addition, she has published several books of poetry and drawings.

She won the National Dance Award 2012 for choreography.

archivoartea.uclm.es/artistas/monica-valenciano