Marcela Santander Corvalán

In 2019, during the uprising against the government in Santiago de Chile, Marcela Santander Corvalán witnessed a memorable scene: hundreds of protesters taking turns to tap in rhythm on the metal surface of a build-ing with bits of paving stone prised off the pavements. The resonant experience aroused the choreographer’s imagination and she began to consider the history of the stones and the stories they might tell. The pre-Columbian legend according to which the millennial monolith Puerta del Sol (Gate of the Sun) in Bolivia contains a secret left hidden to help save future humanity from trouble. How do we travel through time and space to listen to stones? How is mythology created today? Bocas de oro is an invitation to to look for fic-tive knowledge, in order to ward off the action of reduction that the oppression operates, to imagine ways of collective resistance, and to invent powers of the small and the tender.

Born in Chile, Marcela Santander Corvalán trained in Milan and then at the CNDC in Angers. She also graduated in history and dance from the University of Paris 8. Since 2011 she has been working alongside choreog-raphers Dominique Brun, Faustin Linyekula, Julie Nioche, Ana Rita Teodoro and Volmir Cordeiro. Her collaboration with choreographer Mickaël Phelippeau included the artistic direction of À domicile, in Guissény, Brittany. Since 2014 she has put her name to Époque with Volmir Cordeiro (2015), her first solo Disparue (2016), MASH with Annamaria Ajmone (2017), and Quietos (2019). In 2020 she co-authored the performed conference CONCHA – Histoires d’écoute on the theme of listening, with Hortense Belhôte. Marcela Santander Corvalán was associate artist at the Quartz theatre in Brest from 2014 to 2017 and is currently at La Manufacture, CDCN Nouvelle-Aquitaine Bordeaux La Rochelle.