A stage ritual filled with movement, rhythm, subtlety, emotion and energy. The dance, as an expressive vehicle and a primitive language, is conveyed through different solos, pas a deux and group choreographies.

In Paradisum

Dance, art and music join in 'In Paradisum', a polyphonic dance.

Info

Since ancient times, human beings have sought collective mechanisms and rituals to transcend the mundane and have felt, as individuals, the need to feel part of a whole. In the past, we had religious masses, cults, pilgrimages and pagan celebrations. Today we perhaps try to fill that gap with music festivals, concerts or raves. In short, we turn to collective experiences that congregate thousands of people with a common experience around music and the body. Rather than a place, can we say Paradise is more a mental and physical state?

As a kind of time travel, In Paradisum proposes a dialogue between religious music and pop music, the sacred and the mundane, the collective and the individual. A human reflection on the concept and search for spirituality in our time. A stage ritual filled with movement, rhythm, subtlety, emotion and energy.

The dance, as an expressive vehicle and a primitive language, is conveyed through different solos, pas a deux and group choreographies. It created upon and projected through the different voices and choral tones of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548 -1611), one of the most relevant and advanced composers of his time. With an innovative style whose influence continues to this day, his music pushed beyond the bounds of the Renaissance with all its balance and purity, to usher in the intense dramatic quality of the Barroque expression. With the desire to bring back Spanish musical heritage, this creation pays the first ever tribute in dance to this brilliant composer.

The piece encompasses an original aesthetic concepts, inspired in the colour pallete of the painter El Greco’s, a contemporary of Tomas Luis de Victoria. The visionary intensity of his paintings evokes human transcendance and the divine; a holy madness between the Earthly and the celestial.

Dance, art and music join in In Paradisum, a polyphonic dance.

Choreography
Antonio Ruz 

Original
Idea Pablo Martín Caminero and Antonio Ruz

Music
Tomás Luis de Victoria, “Officium defunctorum”, La Grande Chapelle / Albert Recasens, Schola Antiqua / Juan Carlos Asensio (Lauda LAU020) and original composition by Pablo Martín Caminero 

Stage Design
Paco Azorín 

Costume Design
Rosa García Andújar 

Lighting design
Olga García (AAI) 

Dramaturgy
Rosabel Huguet 

Director assistant
Lucía Bernardo 

Assistant to Costume Designer
Lucía Celis 

Set construction
Mambo Decorados, Gerriets España Wardrobe D´Inzillo Sweet Mode

Photo & Video
Alba Muriel © Alba Muriel

Duration
35 min

Press

“If we had the certainty that paradise will be as presented by Antonio Ruz last night, you’d almost look forward to dying. A brilliant debut by the Cordovan creator for the National Dance Company in which he created this sensorial delirium called In Paradisum.”

Omar Khan. Susy Q 


“...Ruz has created a piece like none other, with moments of extraordinary formal beauty; the ending is overwhelmingly beautiful, a reinvented painting by El Greco that shows a man's struggle between his individuality and his collective belonging”. 

Julio Bravo. ABC

“...an exciting, polyphonic trip which, in its essence, has dance as a link between the similar and the different. During its less than 35 minutes we travel through sublime worlds and underground temples, grand dialogues and disco disconnections. Different opportunities to shape both heterogeneous and harmonic choreographic expressions." 

Eduardo López Collazo. El Español 

“A furiously contemporaneous beauty, with street gestures, ways and shapes intermingled in the dance. It is yet unknown whether this contemporaneousness will become classic, but it does serve as an astonished look at the mystery of our current times."  

Antonio Hernández Nieto. Huffpost