Blanca Li presents a choral song of justified environmental conscience | Culture
It is not idle to go back to the deeds of Suresnes and its festivals of French urban dance, everything that began without shyness and with an integrating vocation in the mid and late 80s of the last century and that grew hand in hand with the support of some visionary politicians (of those who are no longer there), the shoulders of the creators of the moment and the coverage received from the press and the French critical apparatus, then led by these scholars like Jean-Marc Adolphe, Marcelle Michel, Lise Brunel or Raphaël de Gubernatis; writers of several generations who always found, year after year, attending a movement that woke up and grew to stay in the amalgam of processes of the coming decades.
It would be very useful to read them again today, and we would understand better Blanca Li (Blanca María Gutiérrez Ortiz, Granada, 1964), its resistance and its trajectory towards the site it occupies within the quadrant of the nouvelle danse française. Blanca Li returned to Suresnes in 1999 with Macadam Macadam, a commission of weight and with its own aesthetic power, which places it definitively to the crystallization of a rather singular style that brings together its experiences with the modern dance American, especially the Graham method and in parallel its practice in Harlem, concomitance with the matrices of hip-hop.
Solstice, the work that can now be seen in the Teatros del Canal de Madrid, is a medium-high format production with 14 dancers on stage, a musician and a very careful formal deployment. It is very important the plastic contribution of the scenery, video, costumes and light, all of merit and propelling the poetic understanding of the substance of this work, a kind of choral song to the great challenges facing man contemporary, from climate change to ecological awareness. Nothing better than the Africanist environment to launch that metaphor and its alarms.
To understand the work dancistically, the tree of the template has to be broken down. To give some examples: the Cuban Yacnoc Abreu Alfonso, trained in the Cuban modern dance school; Iris Florentuny (who was a dancer for several years at the Martha Graham Dance Company); the Lebanese Joseph Gebraël and his sinuous ways; the Albanian Genci Hasa (in principle of academic training in the Opera of Tirana, but very ductile in scene); Yann Hervé (comes from the musical comedy); Lea Salomon (also an academic); the Japanese Yui Sugano (who played in the Käfig group, other heroes of Suresnes); the explosive Victor Virnot and the Ivory Coast musician Bachin Sanogo (virtuoso of the kamele and with an enveloping half voice). They are the chemical substances to which Gaël Rougegrez, Aurore Indaburu and Samir M'Kirech (a physical hero who played in DV8 Physical Theater under the orders of Lloyd Newson and with Franck Chartier in Peeping Tom), veterans along with Blanca and his troop.
With them the Granada forges its stew, rather magical and communicative potion that is summarized in a sometimes aestheticist song or other uselessly extended: leftover footage, which reduces the impact and value of some scenes. Air, water, earth: a kind of evanescent Samothrace Victory crosses the stage as a warning as tragic as classical and lyrical. The audience applauded the artists for a long time.
