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They float through the air

From Mexico, a gravity-defying dance collaboration
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By Brooke Edge
For The Prague Post
October 24th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
The international ensemble forged a new work in the Czech countryside.
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Lo Sensible Permanente

When: Oct. 30 & 31 at 8
Where: Divadlo Ponec
Tickets: 190 Kč at the venue

Watching contemporary dance choreographed by Juan Manuel Ramos Avila brings to mind the fun of a childhood jungle gym rather than the more reserved sensations usually found in staid performance halls. In his works, dancers dangle from scaffolding, propelling themselves through the air and onto seemingly flimsy poles and rope ladders, sometimes five or six meters [20 feet] in the air, combining evocative, fluid movements with the rigidity of parallel and uneven bar skills.
His technique of “suspension,” Avila admits, is difficult. “It’s not easy — look at the hands,” he says, opening his calloused, blistered palms. But, he adds, “The problem is not doing it; the problem is what you say with it.”
Indeed, without the meaning of dance, his work would just be a gymnastics routine. But Avila infuses his choreography with purposeful emotions and storylines, using dance to speak to audiences around the world as he and his company, Bajo Luz, tour his heavily physical technique. They will be in Prague next week with their latest choreography, a piece created as an exploration of the five senses titled Lo Sensible Permanente (Permanently Sensitive).
Avila, a native of Mexico, began his relationship with the Prague dance scene five years ago when Bajo Luz performed at Divadlo Ponec as part of its Mexican Dance Week in 2002. Following the company’s debut, Ponec and Tanec Praha Civic Association Director Yvona Kreuzmannová offered congratulations.
“She loved the performance,” Avila recalls. “She told me people who saw the show loved it.”
Kreuzmannová subsequently traveled to Mexico to see more of Avila’s choreography, and invited him to be a juror at Tanec Praha 2006. Avila was equally enthusiastic. “I said, ‘Yes, of course, and how can we do a big project?’”
The invitation blossomed into an ongoing relationship, with Avila also conducting workshops in his suspension technique at last year’s festival, and agreeing to choreograph an original work in Prague. That project was launched in August this year, when Avila and dancers hand-selected from his Czech workshops and the Bajo Luz company set up residency in the town of Beroun, outside Prague. Secluded away from the distractions of the city, the artists trained in Avila’s physically demanding, high-flying style, and settled on a theme for the new work: the five human senses of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell.
When Lo Sensible Permanente premieres next week it will be performed by Pavlína Červičková, Soňa Ferienčíková, Naděžda Mužíková, Emma Saarelainen and Claudia Bedolla Vargas, five dancers representing four different nationalities. Working with international artists who don’t speak each others’ native languages was difficult, Avila says, but a good medium for exploring the senses. “There are more than words we can [use to] express ourselves,” he explains.
Avila believes that people — especially dancers — rely on vision too much and need to explore other means of experiencing the world. “We don’t take as a guide for our lives the [sense of] taste or smell,” he says. “We are very poor in this land.”
In Beroun, Avila and his dancers researched each of the five senses by reading about the mechanics of each sensory ability, and then experimenting with their own bodies. For the sense of vision, Avila and company created compositions of different dance-based movements and structures. For taste, the dancers cooked different dishes, ate them blindfolded and described to the others what they experienced.
Research into the sense of sound made a particularly significant impact upon Avila. For this, he and the dancers spent time in the forest around Beroun, listening to the noise and silence of nature. While there, the choreographer was struck by the impressive verticality of its trees.
As a result, in Lo Sensible Permanente the suspension elements mirror that. “The forest is very vertical, so the idea started there,” Avila says. “Now, for the first time, we work only with vertical tubes.
“When upside is down, you almost lose what is up, what is down, what is right, what is left,” he continues. This disorientation confuses the senses, leaving them open for thorough exploration.
While audience members watching Lo Sensible Permanente will not be able to experience Avila’s suspension techniques physically, he hopes the choreography will impact them emotionally, making them think more about how they interact with people and things around them. Particularly in an international realm, Avila says, where his Spanish language and the audience’s Czech language don’t meet, a physical enactment of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch becomes integrally important.

Brooke Edge can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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