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Ester Guntín

I am Ester Guntín, a choreographer and stage director. I hold degrees in Humanities, Comparative Studies of Art, Literature and Philosophy, and in Choreography. Due to my academic background in humanities, aesthetics, comparative studies, and my subsequent training in choreography, my approach to the stage is hybrid. My proposals never start from the body but from dramaturgy; I work with image and movement for their great allegorical potential.

I am interested in live arts for their ability to create new languages that connect with the viewer in a way different from cinema, literature, or visual arts. Stage time is a unique time, in which each work expresses a micro or macro world that coexists with the time of reality through the viewer. I understand stage creation as a substitute for the function of myth in contemporary culture: a myth that is renewed with each performance. I am interested in understanding how myth works in our Western society and how it emerges in different spaces and moments of our lives, both narratively and visually. I see the stage space as a point of connection with the sacred: sacred for both its anesthetic and transcendental potential as well as its terrifying potential.

https://esterguntin.com/

https://www.instagram.com/esterguntin/

Photo by Lola Errando

Residency project

“But where danger lies, also grows that which saves us.”
F. Hölderlin

Quiso negro explores the idea of disappearance through action by means of the ritual use of acoustic, kinetic, and iconographic patterns. For this, it relies on tarantism and its arsenal of myths to traverse a very broad, even contradictory, spectrum of scenarios of possession and contemporary catharsis: from the mourning forms in ritualized burials to the unregulated ecstasy of the rave. The work seeks the potential of the body and the image on stage to go beyond choreography. “Quiso negro” speaks of the death within each of us, which can be seen as a journey through its vitalist aspects: a katabasis, a festive descent.

 

Residency archive Graner

  • 2024 ·  in collaboration with Premi de Dansa IT and Grec Festival · Quiso negro.