In ONÍRICA, Marta Navaridas creates a physically intense and visually compelling play between three performers, in which emotional and physical statesmanifest themselves as live sketches.

The Spanish artist, born in San Sebastián, has been living in Graz for the last 10 years, working predominantly in collective artistic constellations such as Navaridas & Deutinger and The Loose Collective. Her concept for ONÍRICA, stems from a very personal and intimate impulse which she has been carrying inside herself since early childhood:

“Ever since I was a small child, I have been drawing in blue on all kinds of surfaces: From the wall in my room to schoolbooks, sneakers, magazine covers, t-shirts, underwear, furniture, boarding passes, cinema tickets, to the backside of important documents. The practice has been intuitive and continuous.”

Three dancers (Lau Lukkarila, Xianghui Zeng, Veza Fernández) move within a choreographic setting within the exhibition space. The space within the space is an open structure reminding us of an enormous picture frame. Within the frame, the dancers draw and move ceaselessly.

The circular motion, evoked by the space and the choreographic setting, is enhanced by the music and live composition: Manuel Riegler records the sounds of the dancers and mixes them with the live improvised harp music (played by Eduardo Raon), constructing an acoustic loop which encircles the three main elements of ONÍRICA – drawing, sound and dance.

Flanked on each side of the structure by a single row of audience, the dancers transform the intimacy typically associated with drawing into an empathic and epic public process.

ONÍRICA is a dance performance, but also an artistic installation, which can be visited outside of performance hours. The dancers’ lines remain as traces of movement in space.