A visionary investigator of human fears, Marcos Morau returns to debut at Oriente Occidente with La Veronal, the company he founded in Valencia in 2005, comprising artists from the fields of dance, film, photography and literature. After Voronia, Los Pajaros muertos and Pasionaria - winner of the Danza&Danza Award "best contemporary show" 2018 - Sonoma is now on stage at the Zandonai Theater, the latest creation for nine performers in which he projects his universe, marked by pictorial, theatrical and cinematographic influences into the world of Surrealism.
In Sonoma, Morau follows the theme that he had developed in a previous work created for the Ballet de Lorraine in 2016, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, winner of another award, that of the Critics of Spanish Dance. This work was inspired by Luis Buñuel and the dreamlike world of this Spanish film-maker, as well as his critical and political thinking, his personal experience, suspended between Jesuit discipline and freedom, and his undying passion for the drum, instrument of native folklore. "Buñuel has never been so current," says Morau. "He had been able to see what the future was holding for us by discovering that visceral scream in the sound of the drums of Calanda and Aragon. He was already ahead of his times in this: he listened to the sound of the abyss that opens when human imagination is free but man is not. I am interested in the human need to feel alive, part of society, surrounded by one's desires and fears and the fact that sometimes, in order to survive, it is necessary to create a new reality”.
A dreamlike setting, therefore, a place extraneous to the laws of physics where the ordinary becomes extraordinary and reason is set aside. "Sonoma", explains again Morau, "will be a place where the scream of mankind, imprisoned by the rhythm of existence, becomes primitive. Where the return to the body, to the flesh, to matter is lost in the hour between sleep and fiction. In harmony with the most irrational layers of humanity where the united cry to disunite and the separate try to join ".
The title refers to two Greek and Latin words: soma, body, and sonum, sound, but it also recalls the Sonoma Valley in California. Commonly called by the natives Valley of the moon, it is said that in this valley our satellite the moon, nesting on the plains every night, transforms screams and environmental sounds into a hypnotic lullaby, which cradles and calms everything.
