As part of the Dublin Flamenco Festival:
Legendary flamenco dancer Belén Maya presents an unusual production combining dance and theatre.
The show, Habitaciones (‘rooms’ in Spanish), is a collaboration with actor and Maya’s husband David Montero. You will embark on a journey that will take you through all the rooms Belén inhabits, the rooms we ourselves inhabit...
'All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.'
? Blaise Pascal, Pensées
The only mother country we have left may well be our room. From that first room we have as teenagers, the one our mothers work hard to keep pristine throughout the years, like a second uterus we eventually come out of, and spend our lives trying to find again or to forget. From that first room to the last one, the hospital room where we will most likely die, hooked to a machine that sounds like a postmodern bell. In between these rooms, more rooms: bachelor rooms, guest rooms, hotel rooms, rental rooms, double rooms, dark rooms, bathrooms, haunted rooms, parents’ rooms, panic rooms, nursery rooms…
Rooms: Small private countries, islands you can flee to or escape from. And so, with rooms, our memory fills the past and reinvents it, laying it out until it builds the house of what we were. This is what Belén Maya does in this show: she offers rooms of her dancing and rooms of her life, combining memory and desire, maybe inventing what tomorrow's home will be. She is joined by silence, by the images and sounds of her memory, the music that filters through partitions, the words, the things, the dresses and a man (an actor, a tireless listener of flamenco, an amateur writer) who looks suspiciously like her husband in what we call real life. And this man is me.
-David Montero
