Nacho Duato Dance Company: Speaking on Stage

The stage is the place where Nacho Duato should speak. It's where his true talent is expressed: choreography. An extraordinary talent, from which the Spanish public benefited during the twenty years he directed the Compañía Nacional de Danza —with its logical ups and downs, its many lights and its not inconsiderable shadows. No one can deny the Valencian artist's role as a catalyst for dance in our country, and it would be a mistake to let his repertoire, for whatever reason, remain in a drawer.

There's something of a "we were just saying yesterday" about the presentation of his company, the CDND (he had to include the first "D" because it coincides with the acronym of the National Dance Company itself); and there was because the Albéniz Theater was, in the 1990s, the scene of many magnificent evenings.

The unruly choreographer has created a company based on the Academy he founded less than two years ago in Madrid; according to the program, it is made up of eighteen dancers, who will have to give way to other colleagues, as their stay is temporary and related to their training. Judging by what was seen at the Albéniz on the night of the premiere, Duato and his team— Emilia Jovanovich, Luis Martín Oya, Mar Baudesson, María Luisa Arias— have done a fantastic job. To their youth—which usually carries with it enthusiasm, absolute dedication, and energy—they add remarkable quality and a fit with Nacho Duato's particular and unmistakable language.

It's beautiful, we must insist, to see a program in Madrid featuring choreographies by the Valencian composer, and to revisit works like 'Duende', one of his finest: sensual, faun-like, impressionistic... A beautiful ode to nature. That 'naturalistic' Duato, uncovered, lyrical, is also present in 'Gnawa' and 'Liberté' (a pas de deux taken from 'Rassemblement', with music by the Haitian Totó Bissainthe ). The new feature of the program is 'Cantus', a work in which the emotional choreographer appears, weeping for the war and focusing his gaze on the young people whose lives are cut short by the conflict. He does so with emotion, communicativeness, and effectiveness, although formally the piece is a compendium of 'Duatian' vocabulary and a collage of movements used in previous pieces. A minor flaw, in any case, for a moving choreography.