XIX Encuentros Fotográficos de Gijón · Kitchens of Laboral Ciudad de la Cultura, Gijón · 26 November 2022
The project
XIX Encuentros Fotográficos de Gijón, the city photography festival, ran from 24 to 27 November 2022. On Saturday the 26th, María Moreno and Susana Girón presented the book Yo bailo in the Paraninfo during the afternoon. At eight, the dancer performed in the former kitchens of Laboral Ciudad de la Cultura.
Verso Libre is her flamenco happening: dancing in places that are not theatres, letting the site shape the piece.
silencioSonoro handled the sound system: capture, mixing and distribution through wireless headphones.
The space
The industrial kitchens of the Universidad Laboral, out of use. Tiled from floor to ceiling, steel counters, cold rooms. Not a single absorbent surface.
Acoustically it is an extreme case: everything that sounds comes back, and comes back several times.
The challenges
Reverberation. A fully tiled space returns almost all the energy it receives. The guitar loses definition and the footwork becomes a mass without contour.
A moving audience. There were no seats and no defined front. People surrounded the dancer, sat on the floor and moved with her through the different areas of the kitchen. There is no fixed listening position to take as a reference.
Capturing the dance. Flamenco footwork is percussion against the floor, and the floor was the same one everyone was moving on.
Listening
Each person received a set of headphones on arrival. Guitar, dance and sound space came through that channel, with no loudspeakers in the room.
Volume control is individual. The mix is the same for everyone; what each person decides is the level they hear it at.
Imagery
A camera followed the dancer live and projected her image in large format onto the tiled wall, so that she could be seen both in person and on screen at the same time.
Photography
The photographs are by Susana Girón, a documentary photographer from Granada. It was not a one-off commission: Girón had been following María Moreno’s work for years, which led to the book Yo bailo (Fracaso Books, 2020), eighty of her photographs with texts by the dancer.
Credits
Dance: María Moreno
Guitar: Eduardo Trassierra
Photography: Susana Girón
Sound: Javier Álvarez
Production: Bleu Prod
Sound immersion: silencioSonoro