Ex-Stasis
“We are used to controlling our emotions to such a degree that we tend to block what we feel. The mind denies what the body wants and even what it needs.
Modern life and current systems have trained us to work at all costs, forgetting to trust our instinct, moving away from our nature, leading the body to lose communication with the mind.
In this work I express the need I have to listen to myself from another perspective without rational filters. A perspective that is linked to my nature and recovers the satisfaction and pleasure of some of my basic instincts.
Ex- Stasis places me at the mercy of life and its range of possibilities and being aware that the body subdues the mind.
We treat the body as the means to obtain what is expected and if necessary we train it, we submit it to external demands and we are even capable of modifying it. Whatever it takes to meet social expectations.
Ex-Stasis corroborates its validity by working with a material that summarizes in many ways the crucial moment between technologies and waste problems caused by man. Plastic alone warns us of an important scope in technologies that exist today.
It is important to reflect on technology and its relationship with humanity, as well as respect for the body and its needs. Ex-Stasis among other things deals with emotional self-censorship.
-Tania Pérez- Salas
Faced with a greater awareness of the world population about the millions of tons of plastic that year after year pollute the oceans and the need to recycle them, the choreography Ex-Stasis by Tania Pérez-Salas, shows the creative possibilities offered by this material and reflections on the matter.
The dancers interact with curtains of different types of plastic, its malleability and exploration allowed the creation of images and atmospheres until becoming a physical and sonorous extension of the dancer's body. The large plastic curtains and the Pet wall in Ex-Stasis shine when touched by white light in different intensities. The images produced can evoke water, air and other atmospheres. Tania Pérez-Salas comments, “I found it everywhere, on the most remote beach, in the virgin forest, in the big cities; this waste highlights man as a predator of space and planet Earth.
Plastic plays, then, an important part in the narrative of Ex- Stasis. Technological progress leads us emotionally to the indifference and disconnection between societies, as well as in the world of nature on planet Earth and the living beings that inhabit it.
Ex-stasis is a work that addresses between phrases of movement and scenographic strokes the complexity of interaction in the world of the social, and corroborates its validity by working with a material that has highlighted humanity as a predator of nature. It works with a material that accompanies us in our daily lives: plastic, which is used to create curtains that connect and disconnect, just as it happens with life itself in the emotional sense. These curtains have the particularity of evoking different atmospheres. Through seven plastic curtains and a Pet wall that define the corporal and aesthetic movement of the work, to create sensations of a free body, not restricted and confined.
Tania Pérez-Salas, during the conception of Ex-Stasis has been interested in talking about the alienation of the mind and body, how the current lifestyle imposes on people to comply with certain economic and social demands that stop listening to the needs and desires of their own body.
The title Ex-Stasis evokes today's consumer society, including consumption among people. In our daily life we are no longer surprised to see food packaged with plastic in the supermarket, a piece of plastic-coated meat turned into a consumer product that leaves behind its origin, its brutal nature is forgotten, the corpses found in murders and pandemics wrapped in plastic bags. This was the dissertation of Pérez-Salas in choosing plastic as a material for the design of the scenography. The insulating plastic of our brutal nature. I decided to work with curtains of different types of plastic and a Pet wall. This allowed us to have the stage floor free for the development of the choreography and we would take advantage of the theater's loom to make quick and surprising changes that would allow us to generate several planes of action. The malleability of plastics and the exploration with them not only allowed the creation of images and atmospheres, but also became part of our own nature as a physical and sonorous extension of the body. These characteristics were particularly conducive to creative flight in the design of light. And yes, the materials look amazing when touched by white light in different intensities. In this scenography, the materials are what they are, there is no pretense that they represent to be anything else. The images produced can evoke water, air, atmosphere, metal, etc., but it is always clear that it is plastic.
The concept of illumination evokes the coldness of plastic, which could reflect the coldness of modern society, allowing us to see, but at the same time making us feel isolated from the world. As if we saw everything through the plastic that permeates the society of the 21st century.
Through the play between plastic and white light, a game of atmospheres is created on the stage where the choreographic discourse develops. For the costume concept we worked with simple fabrics that simulate the dancer's own skin. The costumes translate the aesthetics of the large plastic curtains to the skin with the lightness of the fabric. We worked with thin materials, which give the sensation that the body melts with the plastic of the scenography. The mixture of plastic and skin is due to the fact that after working with the plastic it has become like another layer of skin. The aim is to transmit that the plastic that has permeated our society as an overwhelming element, has also taken over our body as another skin.
