CONCEPT

A solo that fuses the raw spirit of flamenco with the depth of butoh. Borboleta do Céu e da Terra —butterfly of the sky and of the earth— is an experimental dance piece with live music, conceived and performed by Virginia Torres. It explores the body as a living archive: cultural memory, identity, freedom. What is inherited and what is let go.

It was born in Taipei, during a creative residency at Shinehouse Theatre, steeped in the city’s multicultural layers. From there it has travelled: to Taipei’s Want to Dance Festival, to the Sierra Norte of Madrid, to Granada, where it all began. It moves between tradition and experimentation and unfolds in resonance with each space it inhabits, whether a black box or a square at night.

I come into the work as director of its current version, chrysalis: the in-between state. My job has been to widen the frame. What was Virginia’s intimate journey can now also be read as the journey of flamenco itself: the thousand-year migration of the Romani people from India to Andalusia. Two exoduses, one collective and one personal, looking at each other in the same mirror.

HISTORY AND MEMORY

A people in constant exile. Flamenco carries in its blood the intergenerational migration of the Romani people, absorbing influences at every stage. A journey marked by the frustration and rage of a people never allowed to settle anywhere. During the exodus, their only home was the cultural identity they carried with them: in constant transformation, yet the compass of their wandering. When there was no more territory to move on to, it was their culture that gave them a place. A pilgrimage towards a promised land that was nowhere, and which they reached even so.

Flamenco and butoh. Flamenco cries out the journey of its identity: it shows with pride the suffering it has crossed, culture as a lifeline for the vital essence, a ship on a wild ocean. Butoh also inhabits pain and death, but it builds no castles of identity in order to survive: it inhabits the vital flow there is no escaping, and dissolves judgement to find what lies beneath. One builds to resist; the other dismantles to set free. Each turns suffering inside out by opposite roads, and both touch the same fire.

A personal exodus. Dances of going and returning. Social pressure drove Virginia away from dance after the Spanish dance conservatory. Institutional dance had turned into violence: the sexist aesthetic judgement, the perfectionism that wants the result above all else, the need to fit into other people’s moulds. Dancing had become a prison that stifled the burning desire to dance rising from her bones. So a journey began —India, Spain, Portugal, Thailand, Taiwan— in search of that lost dance, one that would belong not only to her but to all her women. It was through butoh that she could cross the walls the system had raised inside her. A flamenco of going and returning that travels not to South America but to Asia. A new map for reconnecting with an ancestral dance.