TOTENTANZ – Morgen ist die Frage

If there is one uncomfortable truth then it is the truth of death. In our present time, death is put off. It is taken on board to some degree, but there is still a sense of distance, a remoteness, something incomprehensible. In the Middle Ages, the aptly named dance of death was performed to exorcise fear of the afterlife. It was celebrated euphorically, a catharsis of spasmodic movements and violent jolts. Can that idea of medieval liberation, of celebrating finitude but in decidedly contemporary forms like processions, photo calls, dance halls and raves be resumed today?  

Marcos Morau, who founded the La Veronal company in 2005 and won Spain’s National Dance Award in 2013, believes this practice is possible, looking to the rite to face life’s end and a return to the eternal questions the world has asked itself almost since the beginning: Who are we? Where are we going? What is the meaning of this place that we inhabit? 

For his new performance, TOTENTANZ - Morgen ist die Frage, Morau has conceived of a non-theatrical space, the Museo Reina Sofía, as the place from which to give form to his La Veronal stage conception, whereby dance, image, literature and music coalesce. In the three spaces inside the Museo where he will perform Totentanz — one as reception, one as performance, one as video projection — spectators are involved from the outset in a kind of spiritism session that is “disturbing but ridiculous”, as defined by Roberto Fratini, the author of the dramatic composition of the work, premiered in Spain on this occasion.

During the session bodies “appear to speak to us from the final thresholds of the world”, and it is from that point that a journey begins which puts the eternal dilemma separating life and death at odds. This is allegorically embodied by two inert, skeletal bodies, as Morau explains how “they appear to hold more clues about the next world, as though it is somewhere they often visit. Or perhaps they are just two puppets, two figures frozen in the eternal winter of Mother Death”. As in medieval dances, these new figures revive the shaking of bodies, lost in the darkness of the senses and succumbing to the trance of the music and the dance that channels catharsis.        

More than five centuries on, the dance of death invokes these human beings once more. “Our Totentanz”, Morau asserts, “is little more than an invitation to celebrate the fragility of life and to meditate on its loss of value. The current disdain for the values of life is directly proportional to the widespread inability to perform, dance and officiate death as a mystery”.  

Warning: strobe lights are used during the dance-performance.

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