The MUN presents "CreAcción. Iratxe Ansa & Igor Bacovich", new volume of the collection "Cuadernos de Creación".
The publication reflects the creative process of the work resulting from Metamorphosis Dance's artistic residency at the MUN, which included the participation of the university community. The Madrid en Danza festival frames the presentation of the book, available at Trama Editorial.
Usually, a choreographic work is an ephemeral product and there is usually no record of its creation process. The Museo Universidad de Navarra (MUN), however, records and documents the residencies of scenic-musical artists it promotes. Thus, in the Cuadernos de Creación book collection , it collects the creative process and its narration, through the voice of a third party, to generate the cartography of an ephemeral work that extends in this way in time, and leaves a trace through a book; so that others can follow it and ask questions, discover paths and leave space for astonishment.
The sixth volume of this collection, "CreAcción, Iratxe Ansa & Igor Bacovich", narrated through texts by Leonardo Santos, was presented today at Teatros del Canal (Madrid), as part of the program of the Madrid en Danza festival. The publication, which can be purchased at Trama Editorial, follows the creative process of the participatory choreographic work originated during the artistic residency at MUN in 2021 of Ansa and Bacovich, directors and choreographers of Metamorphosis Dance. The show won two Max Awards for the Performing Arts in 2022.
The company and Museo Universidad de Navarra decided to embark together on this project thanks to the meeting between the concerns of both. "Iratxe Ansa and Igor Bacovich had been looking for some time for a place to launch this participatory artistic project, and we were already working on our own production of these characteristics -in this case, made entirely with seniors-, which premiered a few months before CreAcción, in April 2021," says Teresa Lasheras, director of Performing Arts and Music at Museo Universidad de Navarra. "We saw a possibility in the MUN because of its museum format, its seriousness and prestige," adds Iratxe Ansa.
In CreAcción, the artists establish a dialogue with the community of the University of Navarra and the city of Pamplona, thus opening the work to citizen participation. The people who wanted to collaborate were involved as co-creators of this piece, living the experience of building a dance performance, attending rehearsals with choreographers and performers, and making contributions both conceptually and about movement. "Introducing this added bonus of having a working group to collaborate with within a creation involves a lot of responsibility," confesses Ansa. "The difference is in how it is constructed," adds Igor Bacovich, "where the idea comes from and how this choreographic construction is carried out step by step, how decisions are made. The choreographer clarifies that the participants did not come from the world of dance, but were present throughout the process, from the beginning to the end; and that at all times Metamorphosis dance sought to maintain excellence on stage and a very deep research work; betting on a "very technical work, very varied at the choreographic level", which also made use of "very powerful" scenographic and lighting elements. A show, concludes Iratxe Ansa, "of pure dance".
Leonardo Santos is the voice that narrates the development of the project. "This booklet aims to offer a possible reading of CreAcción, through the graphic treatment of written texts and photographs, proposing keys to approach dance as a discipline and an analysis of the structural development of the work, sprinkled with some suggestions of a poetic nature. We try to make the reader become an active spectator of a show that he himself can imagine," he explains.
Juliane Petri has been in charge of giving shape to this notebook and confesses that for her the books "are in themselves a mise-en-scène". The designer says that she started from an initial work with the narrator to think about the type of reading they could offer and then "the graphic language, the 'visual voice', became audible at the same time as the contents were being generated".
Contemporary dance has had a fixed place on the stage of the MUN since its inception in 2015; or rather, as its director, Jaime García del Barrio , points out, "the current creation in the field of dance, accommodating all disciplines, formats and hybridizations with other arts such as theater, film, music or visual arts." Since 2018, the cycle Museo en Danza brings together these proposals from Museo Universidad de Navarra.