La mirada del avestruz

In a Colombia ravaged by violence, choreographers fight with what weapons they have: body and dance. Tino Fernández, a Spaniard who has lived in Bogota for nearly eight years, is constantly devising allegories, sometimes unknowingly, for Colombia.

In a Colombia ravaged by violence, choreographers fight with what weapons they have: body and dance. Tino Fernández, a Spaniard who has lived in Bogota for nearly eight years, is constantly devising allegories, sometimes unknowingly, for Colombia: a country where it is increasingly dangerous to set foot. The instability of the land in this zone of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and landslides is well known and feared. Of course, this also brings to mind the current guerrilla war, the fact that Colombian citizens are confined to their towns, that it’s impossible for them to go down a road without fear of being kidnapped. Every Colombian carries the marks of violence within.

Source : Maison de la Danse programme

“Without wishing to justify barbarism, of course,” Tino Fernández explains, “I have tried to show the poignant poetry, the tragic beauty, like on the face of a mother whose children have been killed. I have followed the drama of the ‘desplazados’, peasants torn from their land by the violent excesses of FARC, the paramilitaries and the greed of big land owners. They have fallen into the most abject poverty, and have nothing more than a scrap of waste ground on which they attempt to survive. In short, I also wished to evoke the impossibility of dialogue when every word is annihilated in fury and tumult. By bringing out the emotions of the audience, who applaud us with tears in their eyes, and identify here with the drama that Colombia is living through, with the twisted, mud-spattered bodies of the dancers, found in the myriad of abandoned shoes on stage, evoking the multitude of the disappeared: yes, in this emotion, I find my ‘raison d’être’.”

Accounts collected by Raphaël de Gubernatis for Nouvel Observateur (September 2002)