Mercè Rodoreda dances in Venice with La Veronal

BarcelonaThe link with the Venice Biennale is an example of the restless character of the company La Veronal, the troupe Led by choreographer Marcos Morau (Ontinyent, 1982), who has become a solid reference in Europe. Ten years ago, they participated in the Theatre Biennial, and this year they're in the Dance Biennial. And they're doing so with a highly anticipated show, an adaptation of Mercè Rodoreda's testamentary novel, Death and Spring, which after premiering in Venice this Friday and having a second performance on Saturday, The TNC season will open on September 24..

"It's the first time that, in some way, I've tried to stage, translate or interpret a literary text," says choreographer Marcos Morau at the ARA. "I was looking forward to doing it, I was looking forward to finding myself in this situation and I was looking forward to doing it with a Catalan author or creator. I had found inspiration in musicians and artists such as Gustav Mahler, Ennio Morricone and Edvard Munch, and I always thought that one day I would do something with Death and Spring", she explains.

Mercè Rodoreda left the novel unfinished, but not incomplete. "It is a rather complex work. I felt very comfortable here." Rodoreda wrote it at the same time that Diamond Square (1962), but Death and Spring It was published in 1986, three years after her death. As the synopsis published by Club Editor states, the story is marked by fear, desire, and repression: "In an unnamed place and in an undetermined time, isolated in the midst of a disturbingly human nature, lives a town subjected to a rigorous law and the constant surveillance of two threats: the never, the beings who want to take their homes."

Motherhood is another key element: "Mothers torment their children's desire with iron punches. Fear." Although La Veronal has passed the text through her "distorting lens," as Morau says, the audience will recognize many elements and ideas from the novel on stage: "We will find the trunks, the pregnant women, the darkness, death, the forest, the water, the lack of hope, the... the... many other things, because when I talk about Death and Spring, deep down, I'm talking about myself," says Morau.

When the choreographer asks himself why they have delved into a Rodoreda novel at this moment to do "an exercise in catharsis," he goes back to one of the company's recent works that also has death in the title, Totentanz - Morgen ist die Frage [The Dance of Death: Tomorrow is the Question], a show between installation, video and performance. "TO Totentanz We were talking about the banality of death – explains Morau –, about how death challenges us and confronts us on television, in wars, in exile, in Gaza, in a way that is implacable and that makes us all observe it as spectators of a world that is being destroyed. And in Death and Spring There's a more poetic perspective. We, as human beings, wonder, struggle, and search for meaning, but nature is clear about it. Nature always starts over; it's a cycle that never stops.

Spring, a "cruelty"

Regarding nature, Morau points out that the American poet T.S. Elliot and the painter Francis Bacon viewed nature, and also spring, as "a wound of the earth" that cannot be stopped no matter what happens. "Clearly, she's not just talking about nature and death, but about herself, her exile, her figure as a woman writer, her identity," says the choreographer, who recalls that an artistic vocation can be a lifeline because it allows her to experience "another reality, a parallel reality, a different way of expressing herself."

The performers and collaborators in the choreography of Death and Spring are Fabio Calvisi, Ignacio Fizona Camargo, Valentin Goniot, Jon López, Nuria Navarra, Lorena Nogal, and Marina Rodríguez. As usual, the set and costume designers are Max Glaenzel and Silvia Delagneau. This show also represents a new collaboration with another well-known partner: the singer Maria Arnal. "We are contemporaries, we are friends, we are colleagues, we share poetry and ways of understanding art, and when we finished our collaboration with Sonoma last year at the Grec, I decided I wanted to continue working together. At first, Death and Spring It was an installation concert. Maria and I were clear that, based on the texts of the novel, we wanted to write new texts, write songs, and have the dancers and her sing on stage, and turn this adaptation of Death and Spring in something that was neither a concert, nor a dance show, nor anything in particular, and that was everything," Morau concludes.