LP'09 - dansa... o no

17 continuous days of programming with over 50 live arts projects that revolve around the body: performances, actions, installations, screenings, meetings and other frontier experiences that explore the notion of play, movement and theatricality.

An event in which individual discourses take precedence over categoraisations of any kind. Aiming to shift non-spectacular performance from the periphery to a central point and moment in the city.

La Porta works to support contemporary creation that revolves around the body, giving visibility to individual works, but also to the processes and thoughts that nurture it, generating spaces and contexts that favour its evolution and connection with the audience.

LP cannot help but moving through the same territories than La Porta: this edition includes projects that have been supported by our espacios cómodos (comfortable spaces)(1) of collaboration, artists who are visiting one of our programs for the second, third or even fourth time, and games like I-want-to-see-again works that have previously been presented in Barcelona (2). Do we like to go for seconds, are we faithful lovers, we don't beat our brains out, or do we think it is important to support the evolution of artists over time?

There are internal pathways within the program that make it possible to connect and enhance possible readings, engaging in this gesture of opening-up our thoughts and our own imaginary: wild experiences, emergencies, accidents, an animated comic based on the story of a terrorist, a blind solo, an installation that is as intimate and sensual as a massage, projections onto the body and onto our imaginations...

Where are we now? After Debord, after Yvonne Rainer's No Manifesto(3) and the memorable desertion of the stage perpetrated by Marco Berrettini and his troupe in No Paraderan, what can we expect from artists who use their body as the point of departure today? How can we relate to their work without questioning our own mechanisms and habits of perception? What place does the body occupy, as a presence, as an absence, as an image, in the reality or realities made possible by new tools and media? Is it a place or a non-place?

Creative adventures that escape classification within the limits of
traditional disciplines.

Dance is no longer dance. Everything is dance.

(1) The espacios cómodos are small financial contributions that take the form of processes of accompaniment, creative residences or visibility for projects that are already operating. These contributions are our attempt to increase the level of comfort of some artists' realities, because we need a change in their reality so our reality can still make sense.

(2) Last time I saw you dancing – the first line of a song by a Mexican group – must have been a pure fluke, because probably you were only in that theatre for a couple of days. And you've already been there, so you won't be back. You won't have a two-week season in your bloody life. But a piece created four years ago is not old, just as a recently created piece is not necessarily new.

(3)NO to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make-believe no to the glamour and transcendence of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved. Yvonne Rainer, No Manifesto (1965)

Barcelona, from 6th to 21th of March 2009