Sonoma

The FAM Festival (Arts and Movement Festival) is bringing the show Sonoma by La Veronal Company, headed by National Dance Award winner Marcos Morau, to Teatro Guimerá.

Sonoma is a word that you will not find in a dictionary. It is, however, built with morphemes from Greek (soma, meaning body) and Latin (sonum, meaning sound) to signify the body of sound and sound of the body.

Today, we live history in a rush: so quickly and in such a hurry that we can hardly keep up. People no longer know what is happening. To put it another way, we are falling forward, and we shout during that accelerated fall as if we were on a roller coaster. Sonoma could be that the sound of a falling body; the human fury that arises from continuing to believe that we are alive; that we are still awake.

Therefore, Sonoma is the shout of the person who is subjected to that frenetic pace, at the limits of existence, from which the body's primitive howl emerges; the struggle of humanity to survive and to feel alive, to exist, even if it is at or beyond the limits of reality.

Sonoma is the certainty that the virtual and digital worlds can be surpassed only by a return to the origin. Marcos Morau has further developed the essential ideas of the piece he created in 2016 for Ballet de Lorraine:  "Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution". Based on Luis Buñuel, it is set in his hometown of Calanda in the Middle Ages and in cosmopolitan Paris, and the plot deals with Jesuit discipline and surrealist liberty. The whole of that microcosmos is developed and expanded in Sonoma for Morau's project with the dance company La Veronal.

Sonoma emerged from the need to return to the origin, to the body, to the flesh. And, starting with flesh and organic material, going on to lose oneself in a journey between dreams and fiction where the human meets the extraordinary. It is a means of making the most everyday things seem strange; refusing to construct meanings; letting signals take root and acquire meaning on their own; communicating with the most irrational layers of any human being, where what is united pleads to become separate, and what is separate always seeks to become united anew.

Sonoma has another meaning in its original language: valley of the moon. Legend has it that the moon nestles within its plains when it sets each night. There, the shouts, howls, and thundering drums form a hypnotic pulse, like that of a nursery rhyme, which, rather than overexciting us, keeps us company and soothes us.

Buñuel has never been as closely related to current events as he is today. He foresaw clearly what the future held for us when he used the noise of thousands of drummers who are part of Easter celebrations in Calanda and the southern part of the province of Aragon as a shout that hits you with the force of punch in the guts. Because Buñuel was here, listening to the sound of the abyss that opens when human imagination is free but people are not.