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My Only Memory
Recording: 2018-07-20 , Open Spaces | Tanzfabrik Berlin (Video © Walter Bickmann)

Juan Domínguez

My Only Memory

Open Spaces | Tanzfabrik Berlin / Wedding

Production Details / Press Releases

The work of Juan Domínguez started in the Madrid dance scene at the end of the eighties, along with the choreographers Blanca Calvo, La Ribot, Olga Mesa and Ana Buitrago, with whom he worked as an interpreter in his beginnings. In the intensity of that moment and in a city like Madrid, the stage was his professional school and his body a tool to serve the choreography.

A few years later, when he began to create his own work, Juan Domínguez immediately moved and initiated a process of fading out his identity as a dancer and questioning the parameters of creation on stage. At the same time other materialities and other bodies appeared: the text, the thought, the image, even the theater as machine that brings us together and, of course, the spectator.

Unable to ignore the structures that define the theatrical situation, his work as an author soon became part of the so-called conceptual dance of the early nineties. In this constellation Juan Domínguez presented himself as a conceptual clown, a magical cowboy, a poet and a curator of pleasure. His extensive body of works of the last twenty years include pieces directed by him and created in collaboration with others, as The Application (2005), blue (2009), Shichimi Togarashi with Amalia Fernández (2006), El Triunfo De La Libertad with Juan Loriente and La Ribot (2014).

Besides he created authorship proposals shared with different agents, such as Clean Room (2010-2016) and organised curatorial programs, as In-presentable in La Casa Encendida of Madrid (2003-2012), Picnic Sessions in the CA2M of Móstoles (2013 and 2015), and Living Room Festival in various European cities (2010-2017).

His work is distinguished by the combination of a great self-reflective capacity with both the humor and the delirium of the poet who, playing with language, creates a new reality, sometimes clearly fictitious and sometimes extremely real.

Juan Domínguez makes us work, think, feel: the combination of intellectuality and passion is perceived in each of his works, but it is most powerful in his solos where the dialogue is most evident. They show the logic of a precise investigation about language and form and aim to shake one’s own status. Each one involves a reflection on the strategies to be shared on stage and demonstrates an urgency to provoke movements in the spectator.

My Only Memory (2018) continues in this line of pieces, that work as poetic manifestos or statements of principles. From the exploration of the possibilities of concealment of the interpreter’s identity in El Pelirrojo (1995) or The Taste is Mine (2000), to the radicality of the scenic situation in All Good Spies Are My Age (2002), a piece in which Domínguez appeared sitting in front of the audience without even once raising his eyes towards the public. The only action took place in the text which was written in first person, where the viewer made it his own or “incorporated” it while reading.

When in 2016 he presented his solo Between What Is No Longer And What Is Not Yet he had spent years studying language in relation to gesture, the production of time, and the guidance of expectation and imagination. In this work he uses intimate experiences, his identity as a person, his name and that of his family, testing the capacity of the autobiographical and the anecdotal as linguistic and choreographic material. The artist appears in a central position of the stage, clearly visible, but its objective is not to show himself, but to hold the materiality of the text, the texture and rhythm of a voice that is as much his own as that of anyone. Holding the text in its physical form as if the text was the architect of the action: as if the text acts, and not he who reads it.

And all this leads to My Only Memory, a piece in which darkness – as paradoxical as it seems – allows us to see. The text seeps into our minds, a place where it transforms to produce an exceptional, non-measurable, non-linear time, a fluke of continuous present that generates itself from changing images.

My Only Memory has a voice without a body or, rather, a body of voice so that, in its materiality, the author is detached and the viewer is apprehended. That voice is directed and sometimes speaks in singular and other times in plural, sometimes it challenges us and sometimes it seems to speak to itself, sometimes in feminine and sometimes in masculine. It’s a voice that responds to someone, that belongs to someone or to a few.

juandominguezrojo.com

[Source: play bill]

TFB Nr. 1208

Cast & Credits

Concept, direction and text: Juan Domínguez

Created in collaboration with:
Alejandra Pombo – Sound material
Gilles Gentner – Light design
Adolfo Garcia – Sound design
Barbara Greiner, Stephanie Königer – Production Manager

Performed by Joshua Rutter, Alejandra Pombo and Juan Domínguez.

A production by Juan Domínguez in co-production with Kunstencentrum BUDA and Tanzfabrik Berlin in the frame of apap-Performing Europe 2020 – co-founded by Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, Los Teatros del Canal-Madrid, BAD-Bilbao Antzerkia Dantza.

With the support of Skogen Gothenburg.

Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin.

Executive production: manyone

Thanks to Astrud, Bomba Estéreo, Los Ángeles Azules, Francis Cabrel, Victoria Pérez Royo, María Jerez, Mette Edvardsen, Cuqui Jerez, Jorge Jordi, Lola Rubio, Olga Cabrera, Sonia Noya, Manuela Schininá, Jesús Acebedo, Diego Agulló, Kike García, Arantxa Martínez, Jaime Caballer, Laura Cerrolaza, Maral Kekejian, Juan Gabriel Harcha, Marta Palacios, Julia Rubies, Alma Söderberg, Edurne Rubio and Julia Rodríguez.

Open Spaces
Artistic director: Ludger Orlok
Production management: Juan Gabriel Harcha
Organization: Vincenz Kokot
Communication: Ann-Christin Schwalm
Press, editorial: Nora Gores
Technical management: Martin Pilz
The performance program of the Tanzfabrik Berlin is supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe and apap – Performing Europe 2020, co-funded by Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Tanzfabrik Berlin / Wedding

Uferstr. 23
13357 Berlin

tanzfabrik-berlin.de/
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Video Documentation

The video documentation is produced on behalf of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe. The purpose of this contract is to document productions in the field of contemporary dance in Berlin. The master recordings are archived by the University Library of the Berlin University of Arts. Copies of the recordings on DVD are available for viewing exclusively in the reference collections of the following archives (at media desks in these institutions):

University Library of the Berlin University of Arts
Mediathek für Tanz und Theater des Internationalen Theaterinstituts / Mime Centrum Berlin
Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin (HZT)

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