Groundbreaking

Luz Arcas

Dancing with poise: Luz Arcas is a researcher of this ideal, a master of dance on the Iberian Peninsula. For her approach to art, she received the Spanish National Prize "Premio Nacional de Danza" in 2024. Her exploratory movements are contemporary, originating not in any dance studio, not from improvisation nor inwardness. Arcas hates the cult around "distinctive signature"—originality is, for her, a hallmark of neoliberalism. Rather, her materials are drawn from, often buried, regional dance traditions. Her props come from Galicia: scarves, dresses, whip-length belts—which she reworks in Madrid like objects of art, on stage, even in museums, together with a DJ, vocals, and violin. She believes in a true body, in "one that is real." A body that vehemently exposes itself to its transience." Her steps are clear, insistent, rebellious. Not flamenco, not folklore, but derived from it and transposed into the present.

Seemingly, Arcas composes solo pieces, yet always in dialogue with other art forms, assembling her trilogies like limbs, such as her Magic Circle (Ciclo de los milagros): three one-hour performances over three days in Madrid, after which you urgently wish for a fourth. The widely touring solo Mariana is part of this cycle. There are more recent trilogies, along with forays into opera and theater. With her company La Phármaco (The Medicine), she explores an art form that points to human (not national) identity, free from fashions, but also from historicism. This is why her work seems so archaic and yet energetic. It seems infinitely modern and yet rediscovered from an infinitely distant time.

Arnd Wesemann

Background photo: Mariana by Luz Arcas feat. Tomás de Perrate; photo: Virginia Rota