Faena

The Auditorio de Tenerife is scheduling the world premiere of the show Faena, by the ensemble Proyecto Ocnos, with the dancer Juan Luis Matilla and the artist Cachito Vallés. This concert is completed with a sound installation that will be located in the hall from 20 February.

Faena

The relationship of the body with space and time is inherent to humans and their belonging to the cosmos forms an unbreakable triad. Humans need and use the movement of their bodies to carry out any action, but it is in work where they show all of their capacity and resistance through effort.

The human activity that takes place from sunrise to sunset is of such a broad variety that it is surprising that it can be encompassed under a single concept: "I have work, there are things to do". What originally consisted of control of the physical universe to obtain food and amenities has been refined to limits where we are almost unable to understand what we do in exchange for remuneration.

Faena is an exploration through an interdisciplinary perspective of human activity in its desire to control nature. It is also a reflection on what this activity means for the individual themselves and how music forms part of this world: supporting, easing burdens, establishing rhythms and cadences or simply serving as an escape from the more or less laborious tasks that have filled the days of mere mortals since they left the Garden of Eden (“by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground”, Genesis 3:19). Indeed, is art a job per se?

From a conceptual perspective, Faena proposes a physical exercise that is inoculated in the unconscious of the audience. A need/obligation to carry out actions through the resonance of the work songs. Music is linked to human activity, heteronomous, which is living and whose roots are directly nourished by the social and cultural reality of people.

Through different songs and melodies that accompany these tasks in different cultures, reinterpreted and modified electro-acoustically by Proyecto Ocnos (Gustavo A. Domínguez and Pedro Rojas Ogáyar), a journey that is both historical and cyclical through the world of work is proposed. Work that serves the most immediate needs of humans or alienates them until it turns them into another cog in the global machinery of unlimited economic growth. Corporeality, extracted and refined from the movements of work, whether repetitive and mechanic, violent or minimal, is the task of the dancer and choreographer Juan Luis Matilla (Mopa) and it constitutes the second part of this performative study that is completed with the stage design and installation of the artist Cachito Vallés. A visual proposal based on industrial work as a paradigm that forces humans to work like machines and machines to think as humans do. On an aesthetic level, metal and other industrial materials have a dialogue with the lighting and electronics to create a stage space where music and dance blend, split and are rearranged.

Work, like religion and art, ultimately stems from a unitary and universal phenomenon that branches into endless actions, attitudes, and motivations. From the farmer to the cyborg, from sunrise to sunset, from cradle to grave.