Sugar Island

Sugar Island is a place. An island, a living organism, a dance. A complex codification! It’s a ballet system that cracks, a weird connection between familiarity and mystery, born from the same source. Sugar Island is on the other side. Far away. Deep down. Sugar Island is breaking – from the inside out. Concentrated. Sugar Island is earth, muscles, ligaments, golden curtains, lights. It is classical, artificial, pop, weird. Sugar Island is not Agon. Sugar Island is Brousse. It is a confusing feeling of being awake. Sugar Island is located in Lake Erie, Ohio. 

With Sugar Island, Cuqui Jerez continues her quest for a suspension of the senses. In this way, she builds on the trilogy of performances, Las Ultracosas, Mágica y Elástica, and Supernova, which have been presented at various festivals and venues in Europe and Mexico. In this investigation, Cuqui enables abstract choreographic experiences to clash with the everyday, the artificial, the classical, and the other. 

Boundaries between presentation and representation blur. Jerez seeks an in-between space, in which cracks in reality can arise. In a difficult-to-name experience – a kind of hallucination – she unravels the hierarchy of our consciousness. Playing with a ballet system and with codification, Cuqui brings us an absurd performance in a manner as playful as it is irreverent. 

A piece in collaboration with Cécile Brousse, Óscar Bueno, Javi Cruz, and Gilles Gentner.

• Following her last passage at Kaaitheater in 2022 with Magical and Elastic, Cuqui Jerez's work will be presented again in Belgium. Originally trained in classical dance, whose codes and techniques she knows well, she wants to broaden the concept of dance and choreography. Thirty years after her initial training, she takes a critical look at the discipline through her choreographic practice, contemporary languages and a political dimension, placing these codes in tension with other ways of making and conceiving dance.