The International Festival of Performing Arts Idem from the Casa Encendida of the Montemadrid Foundation returns from September 13 to 21 to put citizens in dialogue with diversity through the creations of high-level national and international artists.
This 12th edition offers a reflection on some crucial issues for our society: radical social isolation, marginal thinking, mental health, displacement, resistance, maroonage, fugitivity and the experience of darkness associated with light.
Idem 2024 presents six proposals, three absolute premieres and one in Spain, by creators who operate in risky territories and who work from diversity and activism with very sensitive groups or materials. Creators and artists from France, Cuba, Palestine and Spain, with the participation of artists from Japan, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic.
Their projects present a multiplicity of formats ranging from performance or site-specific to interactive installation, theater and dance. All of them dialogue with each other, challenge us, provoke us and question us. Which bodies matter? Who deserves a visible life?
These are some of the questions raised by the Festival which opened last Friday with ‘HIKU’the long-awaited piece from the French Shonen Company, which presented its work for the first time in Spain. Directed by Anne-Sophie Turión and Eric Ming Chong, it oscillates between performance and cinema, fiction and documentary, and summons, through real-time robots, the hikikomori themselves, a group voluntarily isolated from any contact with society and who are presented here as a group resistant to contemporary mandates.
Another notable intervention of the festival is that of Basel Zaraa, a Palestinian artist who presents his piece in our country. “Dear Laila” (winner of the ZKB Audience Award 2023), an intimate and interactive installation that shares the Palestinian experience of displacement and resistance through her own family’s story in the Yarmouk refugee camp, exploring how war and exile are experienced in everyday, domestic and public space. She does this by bringing the now-destroyed place back to life through the telling of family stories and a sensory approach. “The seeds of ‘Dear Laila’ were planted when Basel’s five-year-old daughter began asking him about his home when he was little. Unable to take her there, Basel decided to bring the place closer to her by creating a model of her childhood home in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus,” explains Zaraa.
From another register, closer to the playful and the festive, ‘Kaleidoscopic’by dancer, performer and choreographer Sonia Gómez, explores the idea of bodies isolated by society. In a performative, musical and danced show that stages the encounter of two women and their experiences with mental health, creativity and well-being, it aims to make us know first-hand the potential that madness or stigmatized mental disorder can have.
Paula Miralles and Vicente Arlandis, from the Taller Placer collective, create their piece “Redshift”a “specific site” where they propose an experience of darkness and collective transubstantiation. The proposal appeals to other ways of composing our sensory imagination, of what can be revealed behind what is hidden, in a perspective that is both scientific and poetic, starting from the construction of a dark room and the recreation of scientific experiments with filters and prisms to diffract, refract and reflect light, as well as the recreation of the eclipse phenomenon, in a collective experience that explores how light, space, words and sound work together and affect our body.
Victor Longás and Lucas Ares (Desgarradura), present “The Miracle Worker”a piece designed for the Patio de La Casa Encendida and where they offer the public different scenic spaces to explore to present their reflections on loneliness, isolation and the social disappearance of the individual, moving between the limits of reality and fiction.
Idem 2024 closes on Saturday, September 21 with the premiere of ‘Eyila’by José Ramón Hernández and Osikán-Vivero of Creation, which has as its starting point the question “where is the political force of our spirituality?” The project is developed in collaboration with communities voluntarily and involuntarily excluded from the social space, Afro, migrant, trans and racialized people, and builds a living archive of spirituality, memory, resistance, maroonage, reparation and healing.
