Paraíso de los negros

As part of its dance programme, the Auditorio de Tenerife is presenting the show Paraíso de los negros by María Pagés Compañía.

The Andalusian creator was awarded the National Dance Award (Creation) in 2002, the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2014 and y Premio Princesa de Asturias 2022.

Paraíso de los negros is a Flamenco choreography that draws inspiration from the tension between the principles of freedom and authority that cross Poet in New York by Federico García Lorca, the essence of opposites that is distilled in the homonymous work of Carl Van Vechten, the telluric philosophy of the Négritude of Leopold Sedar Senghor and the claims of the desire of Nina Simone. Here, Négritude is a semantically complicit echo in which the same eternal conflicts that have seized Humanity due to its asymmetric nature reverberate.

This work is about the perpetual pursuit of happiness. However, it explores human limits and limitations that, taking the appearance of unsettling faces, mess up and obstruct the path of the right to desire. Those always liquid and elusive presences seize the soul of free will. They are barriers that impose themselves as a guillotine over the neck of utopias. They are also images, thoughts and feelings that rise like irrepressible walls to make the other invisible; the other as my desire and not as my enemy. In this context, Lorca's principle of freedom is a bird trapped on a branch smeared with glue.

Paraíso de los negros is constructed around choreography, music, singing, lighting, stage design, costumes, and a dramatic account of the tensions created by boundaries which are real, fictitious, specific, symbolic and their consequent violence and aggression on human consciousness.

The rhythm of the work seeks the tranquillity of the balance of the desired common house. However, it is inspired by the arrhythmia, anomalies, disorder and asymmetry produced by the existential anguish that leads people to assert life and coexistence as our inalienable fundamental rights.

Paraíso de los negros is a Bedouin rug devised by wise old women. The ethical and aesthetic components that structure it are woven together by organic semantic and emotional connivance. This deep connivance weaves its ethical and aesthetic principles and the symbologies on which it is based, always seeking the longed-awaited harmony of the one.