L’Explose is a company that is relatively unknown in Italy. Its founder, Tino Fernández, originally from Spain, established the company in Paris in 1991 and later moved to Colombia. Fernández explains that encountering Colombian culture and life was pivotal for the group's development. “A vibrant country full of contrasts, capable of generating thousands of stories to tell, a place where people build emotions through dance.” Over these fifteen years, L’Explose’s direction has been shaped: a blend of dance and theater, aided by collaboration with dramaturg Juliana Reyes. Fernández adds, “Human relationships and behaviors are the foundation of my work. The dancer embodies a sort of uniqueness that becomes a reflection of a much broader reality on stage.”
At the Festival, the Colombian company presents two works: *La Mirada del Avestruz* and *Frenesí*. The first piece (*The Ostrich’s Gaze*) reflects on the problem of violence in Colombia. Not because, as the author explains, it aims to describe the horrors of violence to shock or present a political or ideological point of view, but to shift attention to what violence creates in the individual, the retreat into oneself as a means of escape, the lack of communication between people, and the silence for which one is often responsible.
*Frenesí*, co-produced in 2006 by the 12th Biennale of Lyon, is inspired by the book *Torero* by Colombian photographer Ruvén Afanador, dedicated to the rites of “fiesta brava.” Fernández reinterprets this premise, creating a performance set in a grim environment, a kind of morgue, a place between life and death, where the passion for the bull becomes a stimulus for showcasing a torn body that reclaims its animality in a play where eroticism and the sense of an end are strongly present.
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