When it comes to justifying the obsession with playing the guitar, and making a display of certainly cheap poetry, all instrumentalists in the world have equated our beloved piece of wood to a woman's body. Any cliché, no matter how overused, hides a certain truth; in this case, and more obviously, the resemblance between the body and the soundboard of a guitar to a woman's waist and hips, but also –following the heteropatriarchal– to the impossibility of taming the sonority of an extremely complex instrumental engineering that, if abandoned for just a few days, responds with disdain, a bad face, and a painfully gray timbre. I admit that I attended La materia (the second part of the trilogy on flamenco guitar by the dancer Olga Pericet) with all this mental clutter in my head, intrigued by how a bailaora would approach an instrument that the masculine imaginary has made so much its own.
When it all ended, I became thought and enthusiasm. For quite some time, who knows if due to age, I leave theaters, cinemas, and shows in general in my boring Barcelona absolutely indifferent, without any new ideas to traffic. Fortunately, when I leave the Mercat de les Flors, the experience is radically opposite and, from this Punyalada, I therefore send a resounding applause to its director, Àngels Margarit, because she has managed to make me want to grab a chair again (and also because she directs a facility focused on accompanying artists, maximizing their creativity, and having the delicacy to explain their shows to dance novices without pedantry). This La Materia by Pericet follows this same path, because one can have no damn idea about the art of movement and, nevertheless, spend more than an hour praying that the show never ends.
About dance, I admit, I know nothing. But I do have the luck of having spent thousands of hours in the company of a guitar (and its material) and also of having listened live to the best players in the world, which is why I authorize myself to say that Ms. Pericet's work is a colossal adventure. A cultural daughter of the tablao, but trained in classicism, the dancer manages to weave a show where her body gradually transforms into the medium itself. Accompanied by the also excellent dancer Daniel Abreu, Pericet creates a genealogy of the instrument; she begins the adventure from the wood itself, timidly coming into contact with the wood cuts, which she first caresses with her feet, then embeds the neck of the instrument in her back and modulates her own waist with the curvature of its hoops; this is called reappropriation and the rest is nonsense.
I have to go to the Mercat de les Flors much more, one has to go much more, because, as of today, it is one of the few places in the city where serious phenomena occur.From this primordial physics, the dancer shoots us to very high levels of thought. With two guitars in her arms, Abreu breaks the guitar game from pure intimacy to the impossible task of filling a stage. Then there is, of course, the seduction of sonority: the dancer –who knows if inspired by the colors of the rosette– approaches the challenge of sonic totality by wrapping a mantilla around her head, to remind us that the victory of our instrument lies above all in the tortuous tension of the strings. All this the aunt pulls off by shamelessly mixing flamenco tradition with samba, jazz, rock (even cabaret stuff) without any complexes. You have to have a good pair of everything, because Pericet must become queen of the stage accompanied by a group of important musicians, among whom a bassist stands out, Juanfe Pérez, who is from another world.
In fact, at the risk of sounding rude, what is surprising is how the protagonist's small and fragile-looking body becomes the master of her group of men's musical symphony, directing the orchestra of sounds at will (I was very excited to hear again the Capricho Árabe by our beloved Francesc Tàrrega, which I had played so many times as a teenager, in a beautiful arrangement). Come on, it was all something very brutal and I hope the third part of this trilogy arrives soon. I have to go to the Mercat much more, you have to go much more, because, today, it is one of the few places in the city where serious phenomena occur (this weekend Núria Guiu will be there with her Supermedium, which also looks wonderful). If I can, I will return to its comfortable seats, still captivated by the privilege of having been able to admire a dancer turned into a guitar woman.
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