Looking Backward to To- Morrow

Videoscenography for the choreography of the Avatara Ayuso Dance Company (London) in cooperation with HELLERAU european center for the arts Dresden and TANZPLAN Dresden.

A videographic work about the link of nature and society’s machine that is in the city, transitional details you can perceive. Experimentation with form with patterns, the nature and the city, how architecture occupies nature and nature occupies architecture. The creation process took place in Dresden in close collaboration with the choreographer Avatâra Ayuso.

‚Looking Backward to To-Morrow‘ would explore the different kinds of movement relationships between a very specific urban space, a garden city, and the people who live in it. Understood as a creative study of the traces that this particular architecture leaves in people and those people leave on it, a kinetic essay, which appeals to all the audience’s senses and mind.

Collaborator of the production, poet Carlos Fernández López, about the video:

An external and apparently innocuous journey through the 2009 outer life of Hellerau, this short film is intended as a subtle but poignant radiography of what remains today of the original utopic spirit which produced it, or, more accurately, since the departing point of the film was a humble but vital musical rhythm, an electrocardiography of the oldest garden city of Germany. The playful and, at times, childish clapping that goes with the spectator throughout the work is central to the film, being crucial not also in the structuring of tempo, but also in the emergence of meaning through the collision and confluence between the images that we see and the sounds that we hear.

Despite the fact that, isolated from its original context, the viewer of the video losses the additional layer of meaning, created through the juxtaposition of the non- anthropomorphic moving images and the dancing human bodies, the recurrent use in the film of multiframes, still frames and travelings, contributes to the growing sensation of being in front of a dancing city, one which creates consciously fleeting yet memorable movements in space. This urban choreography starts in the geometric, yet dissolving floor of the Festspielhaus, goes deep into the forest, wanders through the streets of the city and the ends, after diving for a short while into the past, in front of the mythic facade of Hellerau Theatre, arguably the most genuine and enduring fruit of the spirit which gave birth to the dream of the garden city, to create a space that favors the existence of what is fast, precise, and functional, but also open to nature, intimate and fragile.