The San Martín Ballet comes out to the neighborhoods for the first time, where and when to see it

The San Martín Contemporary Ballet, of which they are co-directors Andrea Chinetti AND Diego Pobleteopens its season with a double program and for the first time in a neighborhood hall of the Buenos Aires Theater Complex: the beauty Royal Theatre from the Palermo-Colegiales area.

The program consists of The gestures of salt by Teresa Duggan, e The echo of hands by Nicolás Berrueta, representing two generations of choreographers, two styles and two different creative worlds.

Teresa Duggan had already staged Two Petals with the San Martín Ballet in 2017, a purely Japanese-inspired work. In The gestures of salt deals with another theme, which however is not entirely unrelated to the culture of Japan, for which he has great admiration.

“I don’t know where my interest in Japan comes from,” he says, “it’s a beautiful mystery. But this time I didn’t start from a Japanese story like in the previous work, even though its author, Alejandra Kamiya, has a Japanese father and an Argentine mother. The original music is also by Gingo Ohno, also of Argentine mother and Japanese father.”

-What is your theme?

-Alejandra Kamiya was inspired by a documentary about a Venezuelan salt mine, but I wanted to place it in our northern Argentina and this brought another sound, another music. The story guided the scenes and inspired others; Some characters appear in my work who are not present in the story: magical beings, such as shaman fairies, who act as destiny. They can walk on water and move the moon.

-Did the author of the story see the creation process?

-Alejandra came to several rehearsals and gave me the freedom to recreate it. She says it’s a story in itself.

-Alejandra Kamiya’s voice is part of the soundtrack, right?

-I chose some sentences from the story for Alejandra to say; It felt like a luxury to have the author’s own voice., as well as for the viewer to receive the story. We work with her on ways of saying it; She has a beautiful voice, so it adds to all the textures.

-What interested you most about the story “The gestures of salt” that pushed you to create a dance work?

-The story took me to an interior landscape, to my childhood in the countryside, to going to school with a sulk; also to provincial relationships and the feeling that time does not pass. There is a love story in the story that is pure and deep and that moves me.

-What was the process you used to translate the words of the story into the language of dance?

-The rehearsal time was very short and we had to make great strides in every match. But because the dancers are very efficient and very creative, the scenes came together quickly. I gave them movement sketches and images and we worked on some butoh dance exercises (note: a Japanese modern dance move) for a scene with the men. However, it is not a choreography that I have “marked”, fixed.

-Was it necessary for the dancers to know the story before starting the assembly?

-At the first meeting Alejandra Kamiya came to read them; They knew him from day one.

The echo of hands

Nicolás Berrueta joined the San Martín Ballet after completing his Dance Workshop: “I was part of a beautiful group and some of my classmates also joined the company. I started dancing late, at 17. At 19 I approached classical ballet and then entered the laboratory. In 2006 I joined the San Martín Ballet and stayed there until 2013.”

Subsequently, Nicolás had a somewhat wandering life: he was part of the official ballet company of the Dominican Republic and upon returning to Argentina he wanted to try his luck in Europe, or finally in Brazil. But at that moment he learned of an audition for the Chilean National Ballet, a company with a great tradition in modern dance. He moved there with his girlfriend, a singer, planning to stay in Chile for a year. But they were so well received and treated that their stay lasted a decade.

-Why did you return to Argentina?

-It was ten years in Chile, a whole cycle, and I wanted to stop dancing and try other things. On the other hand, our daughter was born during the pandemic and we needed to return and be close to the family.

-How did the possibility of this production for the San Martín Ballet arise?

-In October 2023 I started talking with the directors, who I obviously knew and who had proposed to me: creating a work of about half an hour, with a more or less small group of dancers, without scenography so that it was easy to be taken on tour and very danced, with a clear and powerful language. With these instructions, all the freedom.

-But you still didn’t have an idea?

-No, the first step was meeting Claudio Martini, who was my dance theater teacher and is a director and also a composer. He had already been my collaborator on a project in Chile.

-Did you then compose the music for “L’eco delle mani”?

-Yes, but he is also co-author of the screenplay. From our initial conversations a very physical idea emerged: how to express yourself with your body if you feel threatened or, on the contrary, embraced or accompanied. We were writing things that we were interested in doing. But not with the idea of ​​creating a story, a tale, but rather that emotions were born from these physical, sensorial sensations. Hence the title. The echo of hands.

-In what sense?

-Hands are a very important part of our expressive ways: when you want to hug it is the first thing that moves, when you get hurt, you put your hands in that place; They can contain, push away, hit.

-How was the assembly process?

-First I brought some movement sequences so that the dancers could copy them and thus learn my language. Then I proposed some examples of improvisation on some slogans. The work has a very precise choreography, built with my sequences, with what they improvised and with what they created on their own from there. In this phase of mine as a choreographer I don’t want to fall in love with my ideas.

Information

The gestures of salt AND The echo of hands They present their premiere together this Friday, April 12, at the Teatro Regio, Córdoba 6056 (CABA). The shows will be held from Thursday to Sunday, at 8pm, until April 28th. Tickets at the theater or on the website complexteatral.gob.ar.