Sancha Meca Castro
performance
The Ruin is a Tail comes out of two residency periods in which the participants woke up at dawn to move from the dreams of the previous nights. Guided by prompts offered before sleep, the performers were invited to move from cellular memories and images that came up in their dreams. This collaboration resulted in an archive of gestures, which this piece explores, expands and questions. Sancha’s interest in ruins as a locus of transformation is here expanded in a tension between the idea of transforming gestures into fossils and rupturing those images. The Ruin is a Tail had its premiere in Brakke Grond in Amsterdam, on the 19th and 20th of June. It is a dance performance for four dancers and musician live editing the sound and video.
An archive isn’t as sterile as one might think. We wake up at dawn to move from the memory of the very first cell. We find that what is gone from the old body still echoes in the new one. The ruin is a tail.
In an archive of gestures, only movement can speak for both what was lost and what was preserved as the fossil. We embodied this archive but were surprised by its ways. We attempted to repeat its movements, but in trying to translate those fossilized gestures we accidentally made something new. The objects taught us how to become sculptures, how to freeze movement. We broke them open.
CONCEPT, CHOREOGRAPHY AND STAGE DESIGN: Sancha Meca Castro
INITIAL PRACTICE AND RESEARCH (2021.): Sancha Meca Castro, Dora Brkarić, Sára Bianka Korom, Thalia Livingstone
RESEARCH AND PERFORMANCE (2025.): Dora Brkarić, Hannah Badura, Nara Gonçalves, Thalia Livingstone, Sancha Meca Castro, Victor Conto
ARTISTIC ADVICE: Carly Rose Bedford & Marta Lopes Santos
SOUND DESIGN: Inês Malheiro