A woman sits in a museum gallery and observes a painting. Near the door a man stands and watches the scene. This is the starting point for the new project from La Veronal, which takes us to the Italian city of “Siena” to initiate a reflection on the conception of the human body. The human body represents and has represented the passing of the centuries, and art has involved itself with human material in as many ways as it has found convenient, while artists have used the body as a container and projector of meanings. The piece is an exploration of the history of Italian art, in a journey that begins in the Renaissance, when humankind recovered its self-awareness, and finishes in the modern world. “Siena” gets lost on the way and we find ourselves in a strange and timeless space, caught up in a game of ekphrasis, the verbal representation of a real or fictitious visual representation, where the represented body and the real body, the dead body and the living body get mixed up, forcing us to stop for a moment to make sense of each of them. It is a place that sees the mingling of memory and imagination and the body as an object, its appearance, its fragility, its mortality, and the contrast of the body as an individual entity in opposition to the masses. “Siena” is the absolute and constant need felt by human beings to contemplate themselves. Observing, recognizing the body’s forms, actions and presence, because, in the end, “Siena” is the desire to observe it forever until it all gets mixed up. In this new work La Veronal continue to draw on references from other artistic disciplines such as cinema and literature. In this respect, Pasolini’s work, so linked to everything human, has also served as inspiration for the construction of a disturbing essay about the centrality of the body on stage, also supported by the language of El Conde de Torrefiel, regular collaborators with La Veronal.

Marcos Morau studied choreography at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona, the Conservatorio Superior de Danza de Valencia and Movement Research in New York, obtaining the highest score on the final project and the extraordinary award of the Institut del Teatre. He made his choreographic assistantship project in the Nederlands Dans Theater II and the company IT Dansa directed by Catherine Allard. His artistic skills are not limited to dance but extended into disciplines such as photography and drama, studying the Master in Theory of Drama. In 2005 he created La Veronal, company formed by artists from the dance, film, photography and literature. The artistic team purpose lies directly on a constant search for new expressive media, for cultural references – cinema, literature, music and photography, mostly – to bet on a strong narrative language with the intention of forming global art spaces.

La Veronal is creating a set of works where each piece’s background takes as a starting point a country or city in the world, creating an analogy between dance and geography. The pieces do not intend to become as documentary films that describe the country directly, but makes use of the elements that the name provides to carry out the development of an idea, an argument. This imagery has led the company to differentiate itself on the map of international contemporary creation as an own voice. Marcos Morau has been recently awarded with the National Dance Award 2013, granted by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and Sebastià Gasch Award, an important prize granted by the FAD Foundation of Arts and Design. With his creations has managed to win awards in all national and international choreography competitions in which there have been: International Choreography Competition Hannover, Choreography Contest in Copenhagen, Madrid Choreographic Competition, Masdanza / International Dance Festival of the Canary Islands, Best show in Fira Tarrega for Los Pájaros Muertos, and the “Butaca” Award, the audience pize to the Best Dance Performance 2013 for Siena.

Marcos Morau and his team have begun exporting its seal to other companies of international reputation and during the upcoming seasons they will create new pieces for the National Dance Company of Spain directed by José Martínez, Scapino Ballet Rotterdam, Skånes Dansteater and Norrdans, both in Sweden, Ballet Teatres of the Generalitat Valenciana and the Royal Danish Theatre among others. La Veronal is present in some of the most important festivals and theaters in the world as the Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris, the Biennale di Venezia, DanceSalad Festival Houston, Temporada Alta, Roma Europa Festival, SIDance Festival Seoul, Stockholm Dansens Hus or Sadler’s Wells in London.