Laila Tafur

Cruce Residency Program | March 2024
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Maja y Bastarda is an appropriation of dances that are frivolous, immoderate, or impure. It is a choice for dances that are lacking. In this way, I highlight the thousand facets of the bastarda, which, thanks to its openness and promiscuity, allows me to enter other times and places, challenging the identity of the traditional. With this fictional construction between the traditional and the novel, I create a bastarda jonda, a Frankenstein that can travel from the tablao to the theater, from the disco to the cave, from the guild to the hobby, or from professionalization to the party. What is flamenco in trap, in Gregorian chant, in pop? Can Whitney fit into bulerías or Laurie Anderson into tangos? What is a flamenco body, gesture, or manner? How avant-garde is and will flamenco be? By combining flamenco and non-flamenco sound archives, the coexistence of styles and idiosyncrasies is encouraged. On this collage zambra, a vocabulary is created that, through contagion and familiarity, sets out to invent a flamenco loaded with questions that appeal to the mestizo.

I have been able to work gently, I have been able to rest, I have been able to suspend the demand to bring an idea to fruition, I have been able to remain alone with a sketch, I have been able to let the earth swallow me up, me and all my expectations, and remain behind the facts. Let things emerge, remaining in just the right amount of uncertainty necessary to be able to “be something,” while coexisting at an equal distance from personal intentions, the rhythm of the landscape, and space for surprise. This is a way of creating or researching that I understand as a privilege; you can allow yourself to fail, you can allow yourself not to arrive, you can allow yourself not to get it right, to relocate your interest, to stray; and perhaps precisely because of that, because of that dispossession, the result or what I have brought with me is the experience of letting go, of stopping, of not pushing, of working in collaboration with the inanimate, that in that enigma of the non-self there is a lot of trust, and that trust can be trained.”

BIO 

Born in Granada, studied dance as an exchange student at the Reykjavik University of the Arts and the Polytechnic University of Lisbon, and finally graduated with a degree in Choreography from the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona. In 2017-18, I completed the MPECV Master’s Degree at the Reina Sofía and the University of Cuenca, where my interest in song and an amateur approach to knowledge production began. This research continues in the MACBA’s PEI between 2020/21, where my involvement with the embodiment of critical thinking grew. This study has taken the name Carne de Canción (Flesh of Song), bringing together the amateur approach to sound production with the profession of professional dancer, in which specialization and the aspiration to mastery predominate. My solo works are called Mi arma, un western flamenco (My weapon, a flamenco western), Susobras, about dance itself, a very meta work, and Monstruo (Monster), about the unspeakable, the wild and the untameable. Together with Alba Rihe, we have created Cobalto, a piece halfway between a concert, meditation and a disco. All these works have been developed thanks to the support of Masdanza, Certamen Coreográfico Madrid, Graner, Sismograf, La Caldera, Barceloneta, Colectivo rpm, C3A, Teatro Pradillo, Leal Lav, Espaço do Tempo, ADF, and MR. As a performer, I have worked for Xavier Le Roy, Janet Novas, Jerome Bel, Albert Quesada, Carmelo Fernandez, Lipi Hernandez, Vero Cendoya, Charo Martín, and Taiat Dansa. I currently combine my work as a contemporary dance teacher at the Conservatorio Superior de Danza de Málaga with my latest project, Maja y Bastarda.

With the support of Acción Cultural Española.