These bodies are made of flesh | Francisco Camacho | English version

*Cover image: EIRA, The King in Exile

Francisco Camacho and Meg Stuart return to the stage together in Steal You For a Moment, a performance shaped by memory, voice, ritual and disappearance. Developed in Sardinia and inspired by the mysteries of the ancient Nuragic civilisation, the piece moves between physical intimacy and archaeological imagination, blending movement, sound and fragmented language into a shared landscape of searching and transformation. Ahead of the performance, Camacho reflects on long-term collaboration, collective memory, and the bodies and voices that carry history forward.

You and Meg Stuart have worked together since the 90s. Is Steal You For a Moment a return or a reinvention of each other?

When Meg and I stand together on stage now it doesn’t feel like we are continuing something from before. It feels that we are making something new.

I would say that Steal you for a moment is not a return. It is rather a way to challenge ourselves to move on, to go on, and to pursue research, not denying what we have done, but trying to open new doors for our research, and for our artistic dialogue. So, in a way, inventing and reinventing.

Steal You For a Moment draws on Nuragic ruins and the idea of a lost civilization. What attracted you to this specific imagery of disappearance?

We were indeed inspired by the Nuragic civilization, during our research in Sardinia, where we started the project and where we premiered it. We understood that there are many traces of this civilization in terms of archaeological sites. And there are lots of stones around everywhere over the island, but not so much information about the way of living, and about the organisation of this society. Their language is totally unknown. There are guesses about what could have been this language, but it’s very unsure.

And one element that was very strong for us, was the relatively recent discovery of these big statues, giants as they call them, which represent mainly warriors, fighters. These statues were supposedly placed near the shore as a sign of protection. At some point they may have felt the need to protect and affirm their territory.

Your work seems to blur the lines between mystical and mundane. How do you approach that tension and make it into art?

It’s a way to approach people when they recognise certain gestures, it’s a way to communicate in a more immediate way with the audience. But also not forgetting about a certain level of spirituality. That, I think, is one of our human need as well, independently of how a person takes it.

So, these two aspects – the more spiritual and the very practical, the day-to-day one are what we work with. Additionally, it could be even the absurdity of gesture that we make in everyday life, or the repetition, or the routines, that we look at and see as choreographic potential.

Are there personal memories embedded in the piece, or is it more about collective and imagined memory?

Maybe also due to my training in theatre, which was at The Lee Strasberg Institute in New York, where we do a lot with memories and the memories that are imprinted in our body, in our flesh, in our skin. So, when I dance, even if I’m not consciously activating, it plays a big part of my movement, in the way I improvise. But I also give value to the idea of collective memory and as a shared memory between me as a performer and the audience.

Another aspect of memory is the space. The synography that Gaetan proposed as a space for us to be in, has many elements, which facilitate connection with the audience. It let us reach the point where the audience can feel and almost share imagination with the performance.

You use voices to channel a lost language. How did you develop this vocal dimension alongside movement?

The use of voice is very present in my work, in my pieces – not only because I studied theatre and had some voice classes apart from theatre school – voice was always an interest.

I like to use voice not just to play with sound but also to work with text, to work with different languages, to work also with invented languages. So there are many ways in which I like to bring voice, because voice is very physical. It’s part of our body. Even the breathing, just the breathing is voice somehow. I also try to break a bit the idea that dance is like a silent movie – that you have music playing in the background, that comes to the audience, but that this bodies are ethereal.

They have organs, they breath and they make sounds. So, this dimension of voice came very naturally, also because Meg often uses voice in her work, in text. And so it came naturally.

In the beginning of the piece we were trying to embody, through voice, the connection to this old lost civilisation in the more spiritual way. Then we added text, which brings in another kind of information, and gives different possibilities, other than the movement. So for me, voice makes the work richer, we can say more with more elements and using more of our physical possibilities.

Do you experience the piece as moving forward, looping, or accumulating layers?

I do experience the piece more as moving forward. I see Megan and I as two persons on stage who are trying and going again, and searching for something, and moving on and always moving on. Of course, there is looping inside of some scenes, most notably when we manipulate the objects and change place, when we exchange elements of the scenography.

This moving on is also accumulating layers, because when sees the last scenes, the audience is making connections to what they seem previously.

The title suggests an intimate gesture. What kind of encounter do you wish to create with the audience in that stolen time?

If someone nowadays decides to go to the theatre and see a piece and take their eyes off the screen of the computer, smartphone, whatever, and allow this time in his, or her life, to just share with other people, sitting next to him or her, and watching performance and having this artistic experience, I think it’s already great.

It’s already a conquest to have people willing to go to the theatre in this day and age when we are overwhelmed by our screens.

Steal You For a Moment is a part of the 19-th Antistatic Festival.

*You can see the interview in Bulgarian by following this LINK.