El hermoso misterio que nos une. Jesús Rubio Gamo.

A companion piece to the MAX prize-winning Gran Bolero, a cry of resistance against the crushing routine imposed by the economic crisis of the last decade, El hermoso misterio que nos une performed solo by its creator Jesús Rubio Gamo, broaches the profound loss and bitter-sweet revelations of things denied and lost as a consequence of the pandemic.The success of Bolero, set to a reworking of the famous music by Maurice Ravel (written in 1928, the year prior to the Wall Street Crash), provided the Madrid-born choreographer with the confidence to perform on a large, empty stage and appreciate the way the body can project detail in the most minimal movement, or become a lone fragile entity filling the space with emotion. In contrast to the thumping themes of the former piece, a 12-dancer work that has toured consistently over the last two years, El hermoso misterio hangs on the Spanish language as it is performed to a narrated string of experiences delivered in a pre-recorded text; the voice of Gamo himself rhythmic, like mantra. Spoken word that relates memory and false memory, ideas and false ideas, hopes achieved and desires abandoned, become vivid in motion. In a second part movement dwindles as the poem is performed live in the hesitant voice of their author, and then give way entirely to a more confident movement in the third, when dance is set to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 (1720), a composition that may or may not have been dedicated to his first wife Maria Barbara, who died unexpectedly while Bach was travelling. The title of the piece came to Gamo while on a bus trip through the splendid landscape of Castilla y León that, like music, submerged him in a sense of shared experience. The way we experience our body is central to how we perceive our self; identity and collective identity as the expression of context.