„In summer of 2019 I could not have imagined what would end up being my final degree project. At the time, the guideline I had to follow was quite clear: to build a contemporary dance piece of approximately thirty-five minutes. There were five of us. The dancers and me. We started rehearsals in October with an eye on June, when we were supposed to present the final result.

The idea we started with was to build a living structure joining the four bodies of the dancers. As if it were a different, more complex living being, created from simpler ones. This type of organisation led me to think of cells and unicellular beings as possible references to create the choreographic material. The amoebas ended up becoming the base of the piece. Their ability to morph into different shapes adapting themselves to space, their way of relating to each other and their vital processes. These qualities became integrated into the internal dramaturgy of the choreography, making it a sample of the life cycle of a being that did not yet exist.

March came and the global lockdown with it. Suddenly we had no clue where or when would we be able to perform. We went from rehearsing with the scenery at the theater to trying to finish putting together some of the sequences through Skype.

In the middle of all this, I realized the importance that the audiovisual medium was gaining in the performing arts given the impossibility of live audiences. So we decided to seize the opportunity and we did something that we were planning for a time: converse the choreography into a film.

A few months later, almost a year after starting to develop the idea, I found myself in the Pyrenees at a cinema creation lab organised by the Cerdanya Film Festival.

There we met the team that made “Abbiosis” possible. We went from five to eleven people involved in the project: Judith, Berta, Edurne, Ainhoa, Andrea, Lluisa, Xavi, Marc, Mercé, Pau and myself.

We hadn’t had any experience working in the audiovisual world and they had never participated in a dance creation. In spite of this, we could understand each other and we did all the necessary things to make the project go forward. We were able to strengthen the original message of the choreography, with a new visual power that wouldn’t be possible in the original format. We felt as if we were releasing the being into our world, instead of showing it in the captivity a theatre would have conveyed.“

– Director Lucía García