A personal yet collective history

In 2009 Fabián Barba created A Mary Wigman Dance Evening. In this much-lauded first solo he reconstructed nine short dances by Mary Wigman, one of the figureheads of German expressionist dance.

In A personal yet collective history Barba expands on the initial ideas set out in that performance. He brings us a collection of dances that ‘are created by other people in another time or at another place’. Occasionally he interrupts this danced anthology with a brief reflection on his own work. Barba has copied each dance very precisely, right down to its most subtle intentions of movement. In this way he attempts – with attention and respect – to get on the same wavelength as ‘the other’. Barba describes this as: ‘tuning’. ‘All artists build on what preceded them. Even Shakespeare recycled existing stories. No one is a blank page, not the spectator either. We all see things on the basis of the knowledge we have, through the filter of performances we have seen before.’ In A personal yet collective history, Barba asks us to listen to the various voices in his body.

• Fabián Barba started training as a dancer in Ecuador and then continued this at PARTS in Brussels. Moreover, he came into contact with many other approaches to dance in the performances he saw, as well as in workshops and other encounters.