Dance: Dance puts the concepts of power and responsibility to dance

Havana/The new work by the Spanish-Cuban modern dance group MiComppañía, which premiered this Saturday in Havana, puts to dance the concepts of power and responsibility, abuse and the responses that, at an individual and collective level, can be given.

The Martí Theater hosts the debut of Servuswhich comes forward in a context of profound economic and social crisis on the Island, where its population is greatly affected in its daily life by the decisions made in Havana and Washington.

“I began to question how it is possible that there are people who always make decisions, and that they have the power to make these decisions and that they have access to positions of power, and how all this affects my own life,” the director and choreographer of MiComppañía, the Spanish Susana Pous, explains to EFE.

Personally, he assures that he feels “anguish” when feeling himself the object of others’ decisions and that is why he decided to focus in this work not so much on those who exercise power but on the people affected by those decisions, the people who “feel adrift.”

“That is why the work is called Servusit is not called The King (the king) or The master. It is putting the focus on the other side, the one who decides life. I realized that this has begun to hurt me, to generate anxiety,” says Pous, who has been working in Cuba for more than 25 years and who in 2024 received the Order of Isabella the Catholic, awarded by Spain.

However, the piece also explores what happens when “someone puts on the crown.” “Sometimes I wonder if the people who are in positions of power – who coincidentally are almost always men – who sit at a table to make decisions that affect everyone, and who one day shake hands and another day fight, if they are aware of that responsibility.”

The crown is a symbol of power and, at the same time, a concrete material resource with which the nine dancers of this dance company play on stage, in a plastic and visual bet that seeks to go beyond the aesthetic to raise questions in the stalls.

“Does power transform or am I the one who had that monster inside and the power takes it out of me?” asks Pous, who advocates that everyone consider “how to control the monster,” convinced that all people can become “that tyrant.”

“What does the most damage and is most worrying in the face of the disaster in which we live in Cuba is not knowing and not being able to do anything”

“The important thing now is to see it, talk about it, analyze it, put it on the table, so that if one day they give us the opportunity to be there and put on the crown, we don’t become that monster,” adds Pous about his latest piece, which has the support of the embassies of Spain and Norway.

Her reflections, comments the choreographer, arise from the current context, “not only in Cuba, but worldwide.”

On the Island, the situation has deteriorated significantly in recent months, when pressure measures from the United States have been added to the deep structural crisis that was already plaguing the country, which has aggravated it to extreme situations.

“What is most damaging and most worrying about the disaster in which we live in Cuba is not knowing and not being able to do anything. There is nothing that one gets up in the morning and can do to transform the country, very few things,” laments Pous. “Sometimes I question how far we are going to be able to resist,” he adds.

He defends, however, that artists have “a certain responsibility” and that their role is “to put on the table how people feel,” something that “is already political.”

“I have the hope that one day all Cubans who want to be here, and who want to rebuild their country, will be able to. And that we will feel like everything starts again,” says the Spanish choreographer.