Talented Spanish choreographer Marcos Morau has made waves across the globe with his surreal productions, emerging as a celebrated guest at the world’s most prestigious dance festivals.
His dynamic new dance piece, Nachtträume, is now running at the Opera House until 15th November 2022. And it is certainly not one to be missed.
Morau founded La Veronal in Barcelona in 2005, an ambitious artist collective combining dance, film, photography and literature. His ability to enrapture his audience with hard-to-crack pictorial puzzles, constantly on the brink of disrupture, while remaining both deeply profound and effortlessly entertaining. With a vocabulary of movement that is rapid, filigreed and full of wit, his daring dances are a hypnotic blend of theatre and science fiction.
Nachtträume is partly inspired by the legendary dance piece, “Der grüne Tisch”, composed by German choreographer Kurt Jooss in 1932. This dark composition depicts the First World War as a stark dance of death, portraying dancing figures as helpless in the face of unnamed authorities. His message is clear: how easy it is to pass judgement on the life and death of others when far removed from any semblance of reality, as is often the case in war.
Ninety years after Jooss, Morau expertly addresses the perversity of contemporary power structures in Nachtträume, asking poignant questions such as: Are we at the mercy of the will of the powerful and who decides who holds power in modern society?
Morau’s stage perfectly blends the fantastic and the subversive, creating a fascinatingly surreal landscape where the monsters hidden in the depths of our imaginations come boldly to life. In this revolutionary world, fiction meets reality, and words, movements and narrative become endless labyrinths and neverending corridors.
Nachtträume is an unforgettable experience, a masked ball where Morau’s audience are forced to look at themselves face to face, and question human ambition to dominate everything around us.
In this dramatic composition, the world crumbles around both the audience and the dancers, as we are forced to question our humanity and selfhood.
Duration approx. 1 hour 30 minutes (without intermission). An introduction occurs 45 minutes before the performance. Tickets can be purchased here.
