Interview: Marcos Morau's strange and beautiful worlds
Marcos Morau, one of Spain's most compelling contemporary choreographers, has straddled contradictions: innocence and critique, humor and darkness, elegance and unease.
"I'm still feeling like I'm a kid," said Morau in a press conference in Seoul on Wednesday. "I like to create things that are a mix of innocence and humor, but also darkness and a criticism (of how we live)."
Three of Morau's works arrive in Seoul this May, each a portal into his rich, often bizarre imagination. The choreographer was chosen for GS Arts Center's inaugural curated Artist Series, along with South African visual artist and director William Kentridge.
After the recent performance of 'Afanador' (April 30-May 1), the next chapter begins with 'Pasionaria' (May 16-18) and 'Totentanz: Morgen ist die Frage' (May 17-18) with his own interdisciplinary company, La Veronal, a club of artists active in dance, film, literature and photography.
'Pasionaria,' dystopian planet void of passion
Premiered in 2018, 'Pasionaria' introduces a fictional planet bearing the same name — a hyper-advanced world where passion and all other emotions have vanished.
'There was a moment in my life where I became obsessed with the idea of the absence of emotions,' said Morau. 'You can enjoy it as a video game or as a joke. But you can also feel sadness in a depressive allegory of our lives. That's the beauty of it: how the piece transforms your point of view, and how your point of view transforms the piece.'
In this allegorical work, Morau explores how humans confront, or fail to confront, the void left by this emotional erosion.
'We no longer look at each other, we don't speak to one another. We live in isolation,' he said. 'Individuality has become stronger than community. This piece is a critique of that way of living. But at the same time, we are part of this system. We can't change it.'
Morau encouraged audiences to pay close attention to how the body is used 'in a complex, bizarre way,' he noted.
Dancer Angela Boix of La Veronal added the performance as being 'half human, half android.'
'We were looking to cut the body into as many pieces as we could. There was a sense of restriction, we were not so free. The movement became compact.'
'Dancing with death'
If 'Pasionaria' imagines a world drained of emotion, "Totentanz," also known as Dance of Death, confronts the one fate that unites us all.
'As both a creator and a human being, we are all curious about death — the idea of it, the disappearing,' said Morau. 'Death is democratic because everyone is going to 'dance with death.' It doesn't matter who you are in life; in the end, we're all together.'
With 'Totentanz,' his latest creation with La Veronal, premiered in 2024, Morau explores how death appears in society and how we often look away.
The piece transforms the stage — this time, the lobby of GS Arts Center — into a dark, dreamlike space where the boundary between the living and the beyond begins to blur. Four performers engage in a strange, ritualistic performance, using fragmented gestures, extreme postures, and dynamic interactions to channel the emotional spectrum of mortality.
'One thing that is quite liberating as a dancer is that you feel like you are just one layer of many layers,' said Boix. 'You don't have this pressure that everything relies on you, because you are supported by the piece itself, by the music, by the scenography and all the artists in the company. You are just putting yourself as one more piece of this big engine.'
hwangdh@heraldcorp.com
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