Sofya is developing her career as a performative artist and butō dancer and is creating her own dancing technique, which she has called polymorph dance. What follows is a brief presentation of its nature, extracted from her own website, polymorphdance.com, which contains, too, information relative to the classes she is currently teaching in Madrid.
Strength is not only the reverse of fragility, but its secret; for the strong dwells in the intimacy of the fragile. To pay attention to the most subtle and follow its movement is to silently deploy an immense force. In polymorph dance – which is a new technique I am developing combining butō and contemporary dance – we listen to the silent voices of the body in order to find new ways of being and moving. We give life to what in the body remains silent or forgotten and is, therefore, apparently dead. The most powerful – or even titanic – dances arise precisely from there.
I am interested in dance as an expression of the very variety in which life consists, and this is how I approach it. I imagine, for example, what and how the first cell that made its way to life on our planet felt, and that this feeling of its own – of water, the sun, gravity … – shaped it. I imagine that what that cell did was, all of a sudden, to move and to feel and, combining the one and the other, to think. That is why polymorph dance seeks to awaken sensitivity and its evocative power, to investigate the earthly origins of movement and to think about how much, by moving and feeling, we experience and live.
We explore who we are separately and who we are together. And in doing so, we explore what we can become, what we can transform ourselves into. Like in a theatre, we let things happen and take care of that happening. “Polymorph” is a word with Greek roots that alludes to that which has or can have “multiple forms.” Life is transfiguration. We transform ourselves wanting to explore, to feel, to move, to know… For the same reason, polymorph dance is a dance of transformation, of changes, sometimes fleeting and sudden, sometimes meditative and slow. In any case, we always start from a state of being or we always reach it: we surrender ourselves to the magic of metamorphosis.
In my eyes, every body is a possible synthesis of matter and spirit traversed by forces as old as life itself. A perfect dance would be a dance as fiery and powerful as the latter, and at the same time so fragile as to be destroyed by a breath of wind; but also a dance that runs through the folds of spirit and matter that make up the body, drawing from it the forces that weave and unweave the world.
By combining contemporary dance and butō, polymorph dance invites you to swim and dance on the surface of the sea as well as to dive and dance in its depths, jumping from one area to the other… falling upwards and rising upwards. In some classes we play with Poseidon, the god of the oceanic abyss, while in others our partner is Proteus, the god of the waves. We don’t learn how to dance, but we find out where the movement comes from and where it can lead. Dance emanates naturally from this enquiry, which makes every dance a unique dance.
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