Held on 22 Nov 2018
“I’m interested in creating moving landscapes, offering the spectator a state of contemplation, where hyper attention, expectation, suspense and emotion are at playn”.
Cuqui Jerez
How can tension be produced with minimum meaning? What would the possible frameworks of meaning be to bring about a suspension of meaning that causes tension? Choreographer and performer Cuqui Jerez (Madrid, 1973) forms part of the line-up for the 36th Autumn Festival courtesy of a stage laboratory she has been developing since June of this year with the support of the Community of Madrid and the Museo Reina Sofía. The project will come to a close in November with the mise en scène of The Ultrathings in the Protocol Room of the Sabatini Building, where the results of the creative process throughout the laboratory will be displayed.
After working in the 1990s as a performer with different choreographers around Europe, Cuqui Jerez embarked upon her own choreographic work in 2011, and since then she has devised stage pieces and videos which have been shown at numerous European and Latin American festivals. Although, essentially, she works with creation, she has also participated in publications and research, curatorial and teaching projects; not simply a choreographer per se, Jerez has made performance a creative habit. There is no dance in her work, or at least not in the classical sense of a body moving on stage — her pieces look to subvert categories in artistic disciplines, experimenting with oxymorons, such as creating dance pieces without using the body.
Jerez’s work in this new stage laboratory involves creating a poetic space that moves through aspects which are unsettling, incomplete and altered by way of choreographic scores and landscapes that breathe; a space in which to develop actions and subtle situations that produce tension through altered meaning, imagining the possibility of leaving ourselves behind to reach new realities.
How can we suspend the meaning of an action, a space, an object, a body? To answer this question, Jerez considers working from situations of fragmentation, emptiness, dilation, absurdity, interruption, repetition, or temporary jumps. That is where she explores that which is undefined, suggested, insinuated, duplicated, that which is unsettling and uncertain.
In the laboratory the artist explores practices to observe and find possible mechanisms that generate tension in the sphere of action, the object, image and space, ultimately arriving at a living installation, a performance situation in a built space, an inhabited short-circuited landscape, where there is interaction with objects and bodies that are similarly short-circuited. This is The Ultrathings.
In collaboration with
Museo Reina Sofía
Organised by
The Community of Madrid’s 36th Autumn Festival
Technical sheet
Created by: Cuqui Jerez
With: Óscar Bueno, Cécile Brousse and Javier Cruz
Year of production: 2018
The Ultrathings is a laboratory conceived by artist Cuqui Jerez, with Óscar Bueno, Cécile Brousse and Javier Cruz, in addition to a group of participants selected via an open call.
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