Spanish delights

BACH TO BAC María Muñoz feels the music.

Photograph: Jordi Bover

When faced with the decision about which choreographers to present in New York as part of Catalan Days—a festival encompassing arts, food and literature from Catalonia and the Balearic Islands—Borja Sitjà had to think more in terms of the theater than money. "We chose little shows or solos," he says in a telephone interview from Barcelona, where he is the head of the performing arts department at the Ramon Llull Institute. "The space at the Baryshnikov Arts Center—it is better to bring something smaller."

Someday he hopes to bring full companies, but for now the dance portion of the festival, begining Tuesday 5 with Sònia Gómez, will take place at the intimate Howard Gilman Performance Space and feature four one-night-only events that sample the breadth of Catalan dance. "These are very different proposals, but they show that we have classical and contemporary dance, as well as shows that are in the age between performance and dance," Sitjà continues. "I hope that people will become curious about what is happening here."

Along with two established forces in the Catalan scene—María Muñoz, an artistic director of the 20-year-old company Mal Pelo, and Àngels Margarit, a member of the first generation of dancers trained at the Theatre School in Barcelona in the '70s—the festival showcases work by Societat Doctor Alonso (Volume II features a DJ dressed as a bear and a dancer with her limbs bound) and Gómez's touching, funny My Mother and I. The 50-minute work pairs Gómez onstage with Rosa Vicente (the choreographer's actual mother) in a blistering duet that depicts the hostile, neurotic and loving relationship between a mother and daughter. Speaking from Barcelona, Gómez recalls the dance's beginnings: "At first, it was just an idea—crazy, a little bit, because my mother had never been on the stage before. She is not an actress or a dancer. My idea was, Okay—we are coming from the same place because we are family, but our lives are very different now, and that is the main idea; we talk about those differences."

Even though My Mother and I, for Gómez, is an intensely personal project, she credits its appeal and longevity—they have now performed the duet more than 100 times—to its universal theme. "Everybody has a mother, of course," she says, laughing. "I don't know if the idea would have worked with my father. This was not possible, because my father died, but the mother image is just stronger." She also uses their physical differences to theatrical affect; on the surface, Vicente, blond and blue-eyed, little resembles her brunet daughter. "Some people thought we were not related, but we are," Gómez says.

"I think it works because we are real. The beginning is very formal and then I question her: ‘Why are we here, you and me?' To show that life on the stage is not so easy to do, but the way we are on the stage and the things we are talking about are not so different from the way we are in life."

Another choreographer, Muñoz, who regularly creates larger works in Spain with her collaborator, Pep Ramis, hasn't performed in New York since the early '90s. In Bach, set to selections from The Well-Tempered Clavier, she performs a rigorous solo; austere and beautiful, it marks a departure from the set- and text-heavy collaborative work that she normally produces as part of Mal Pelo. "Bach is a very simple piece," she says. "It takes place in a white space, like a white page. I'm dressed in black and my only purpose is to concentrate on the music, to try to get through the different layers that you find in The Well-Tempered Clavier and to really try to offer that to the audience."

While Bach is highly structured—and Muñoz, like Gómez, has performed it dozens of times—she focuses on finding a freedom within the Glenn Gould recording, which she chose for the way notes are sustained, creating a subtly percussive quality. "For me, this is a very pure dance piece," she explains. "It's true that there are a couple of moments where the light of video is used to fragment the space, but when I incorporated the video, it was also a way to have some moments to breathe and to rest. I really needed to find moments where I could calm down."

For Muñoz, Bach puts her in touch with dancing at its most transparent; in the solo, she strives to locate a free place within herself, even before she begins to move. "I have this feeling that, when I touch the dance, I'm in that position of an artisan who really loves all the flavors and all the qualities of the movement," she explains. "The movement, the space, the musicality. And I have the feeling that's about something that I have very strong inside. In my other work, I have different motivations, where the dance becomes one element in the service of something else. For me, Bach was not so much a personal challenge to reaffirm myself. It was more about finding a situation or a space to put forth that artisan relationship that I have with dance. It's only that."

Catalan Days runs Sat 2–May 12 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center; dance events are Tue 5, Wed 6, May 7 and 8.

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