MCA Studio: Workshop with Sònia Sánchez
Copresented with Clinard Dance and presented as part of the Chicago Flamenco Festival 2015
Performance artist Sònia Sánchez teaches flamenco technique grounded in the form, musicality, and rhythm of the body. Discarding everything except technique, “as if facing an orchestra that has lost its score,” Sánchez composes with her body. Her workshop bonds the technique and improvisation of flamenco to electric guitar and vocals by collaborators David Soler and Miguel Angel “el Londro.”
Sònia Sánchez, Le ça
Photo: Dani AlvarezAbout the Artist
Sònia Sánchez is a contemporary movement and sound artist who explores and tests the flamenco form in order to write her own personal language. Born in 1974 in Sabadell, Spain, Sánchez attended the Conservatory of Dance in Madrid and continued her training in Barcelona with La China and butoh master Hisako Horikawa. For Sánchez, both flamenco and butoh are fundamental techniques for using improvisation, rhythm, and movement in the quest of a purely free and spontaneous body. Sánchez performs with leading flamenco figures such as Antonio Canales, Cristina Hoyos, and Tomatito. Her meticulously crafted works include Retales, Rincones y claros de bosques, 23 de mayo, and Temple. In her 2012 solo piece El pliegue, which toured to Dansmakers Amsterdam and Rencontres Chorégraphiques de Seine-Saint-Denis, her body bends and stretches to her own sounds and silences. Her interest in experimental sound has led her to collaborate with trumpeter Julián Sánchez and electronics composer Joaquim Puigtió, and to perform in her free jazz project Sai Trio with award-winning pianist Agusti Fernandez and acclaimed jazz drummer Ivo Sans.