“”Curiosity has been the counsellor that has guided the great decisions of my life.”“
TEARING AND REBIRTH
Pinza: Machina Mundi is born from the exploration of the tension between technology and humanity in the 21st century. Conceived from a first fragment presented in Ibiza in the summer of 2010, the piece culminated in an intense process of scenic and personal research, premiering at the Kojoteki festival in Lugo in December 2011.
The work stands as a visceral fusion of gestural theatre, butoh dance and the naked honesty of clown. In a stripped-down scenic space, where the absence of scenographic paraphernalia yields the spotlight to the power of the body in movement, the piece relies on meticulous lighting and sound work to amplify its impact.
Pinza arises from the impulse to explore the layers of identity we constantly build and destroy, investigating how to remain authentic without rejecting our time. Curiosity as the engine of personal transformation becomes here a scenic tool to question the armour that distances us from our essential nature.
At its core, two thematic currents intertwine with the force of a clamp. Pinza was born from the echoes of a complex relationship with technology, a bond where love and weariness went hand in hand. But it was loss — the deep wound of my father’s death — that was the true catalyst. That void became the engine that drove me to strip away the layers of armour that distanced me from my own essence, from my most primal nature.
“I wanted to remove the scales that protected my own nature.”
SYNOPSIS
I move across the border of body and thought,
the border of culture and body.
The body itself is thought, is culture, is society.
The contradiction is not between my mind and my body,
but in the impossibility of crossing my own skin, my own culture.
I cross this border and die.
I am reborn, facing what I find on the other side.
But inevitably I cannot reject the skin I have.
how many skins does my body have?
To empty myself of everything until I find an empty body.
To deepen into the void until I find all the borders again.
inside one skin, another skin
time is a costume sewn to the body
pain, the clamps that hold it fast
Cathedrals sinking into the pores
your body alone pressing its borders
swelling until your limits burst
screaming at the speed of light
hunted by your own skin
then you appear, you come from tenderness
holding up your machine of the world
collapsing with no ground beneath you
devouring yourself blind
Only I know your secret, everyone shares itNieves Neira Roca
(translated from the Spanish)
ARTIST’S NOTE
“Pinza taught me that stripping away can be an act of abundance. Born from the urgent need to explore what remained of me after a deep loss, I did not know that in that search for divestment I would find such richness. Each time I perform it, I rediscover something new about how technology and humanity can coexist without one devouring the other. I hope the audience finds in Pinza a safe space for their own questions about identity and transformation, and that they leave with more questions than answers.”
GALLERY
SITE SPECIFIC: The Space as Mutant Skin
Pinza sheds the rigidity of the traditional stage to merge with the unique epidermis of each space.
Far from imposing itself, it listens to the vibrations of the place, absorbs its breath and returns it metamorphosed into movement. Each encounter is a new skin, an unprecedented reading of its essence.
This capacity for transformation is also reflected in its time, malleable as clay, from the urgency of its initial 10 minutes to the contemplative expansion of its longest versions.
ARTISTIC CREDITS
· Classification: Butoh / Clown
· Creation: 2012
· Duration: 60 min (10, 35 and 45-minute versions)
· Age rating: All audiences
· Direction, Choreography and performance: Matilde J Ciria
· Lighting design: Rafaela Bidarra and Matilde J Ciria
· Music editing: Matilde J Ciria
(Jordi Savall, Jocelyn Pook, Pauchi Sasaki, Toshimaru Nakamura, Ozy, Nat King Cole, Alva Noto, Javier Ciria)
· Poetic texts: Nieves Neira Roca.