PARTY is an immersive dance piece for 10 spectators. Alluding to elements of our collective memory and popular culture, the piece creates a utopian simulation of a night out that acts as a trigger to hack the viewer’s senses, blurring the boundaries between reality and representation.
PARTY is a dance piece where the protagonist and sole subject is the spectator, which unfolds through a fixed, semi-narrative structure containing a series of simple instructions that the audience receives through wireless headphones, creating a kinetic experience of thought. PARTY takes place in a space in-between, between the artist and the spectator, in a “between” that involves memories we no longer remember and images we didn’t know we were holding onto, resulting in a public and private living organism, a process of continuous birth. PARTY is a journey through time, a festivity, an invitation to celebrate all the bodies we have been.
This piece, created in 2016 in collaboration with Sammy Metcalfe and Brazilian dancer and choreographer Daniela Perez, was programmed by major theaters and festivals in Spain, and also toured the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Mexico.
“This is the warm-up that every man or woman must do.”
“An exercise in reflection: an ode to your life, what you've done and what you haven't, your memories, your childhood, your first love; who you are... An immersive show where reality surpasses itself.”
“It manages to shatter the boundaries between reality and representation to make us fully aware of the group drive, but also of the individual drive, like a good concert.”
“Here appears the action of “the we.” The author is all of us.”
PARTY is a piece by iara Solano Arana in collaboration with Daniela Perez (Beaches)
TEXT AND DRAMATURGY: iara Solano Arana
VOICE IN SPANISH AND ENGLISH: iara Solano Arana
VOICE IN PORTUGUESE: Daniela Perez
SOUND DESIGN, ORIGINAL MUSIC, AUDIOVISUALS, AND ADVISOR: Sammy Metcalfe
ORIGINAL IDEA, TEXT, AND VOICE: iara Solano Arana
SUPPORT ON TOUR: Instituto Etxepare
LANGUAGES AVAILABLE: Spanish, English, and Portuguese
PHOTOS: Arturo Laso/Casa Encendida y Blan&Lau
PARTY was developed in Palmas (Brazil) with the support of the Funcult Arnauld Rodrigues Award for Daniela Pérez’s Dancing Through Your Body project and premiered in July 2016 at Las Naves del Español in Matadero Madrid, with the support of Frinje Madrid.
PARTY is one of my first works in which I address the strategy of working in the dark to trigger perception and imagination. For much of the piece, the audience is blindfolded, and it is from this darkness that we explore the phenomenology of a collective imagination, where the audience co-[re]imagines. Because, as André Lepecki writes in Exhausting Dance: “when dance and choreography deliver nothing to the view, that is when something is revealed.” Since then, I have used darkness as a promise of freedom, as resistance and subversion in the face of current hypervisibility, and as a dissolution of the sociocultural conventions that force identity and define us as subjects.
During my research, I developed a series of practices based on virtual movement, exploring ways of understanding dance as somatic reflection and finding new ways of choreographing thought. Considering at least two forces in each movement—one virtual and one material—I recognize both movements as corporeal and physical, since both think and feel movement through the entire body. In general, dance practices, studies, theories, and research consider physical-material movement as a central element, ignoring the possibilities offered by working with virtual movement as also physical. PARTY helps us rethink and reconsider this virtual movement, recognizing it as real and proposing that the spectator be the performer and protagonist of the piece, both physically and virtually.
