News
Dancer Patricia Álvarez completes an artist-in-residency program at Casa Árabe’s headquarters in Cordoba
The performer is preparing a video dance piece titled ALANDALUSoy as part of the collaboration between Casa Árabe and the "Al-Andalus in Mexico" event to be held in July of this year.
March 01, 2021
CÓRDOBA
Throughout the month of March, Casa Árabe’s headquarters in Cordoba will be hosting an artist-in-residency program for Patricia Álvarez, a dancer specializing in traditional Mediterranean dances and a scholar in the language of body and gesture. During the program, she will be creating ALANDALUSoy (Survival and Imaginaries): Two women creating in one territory.
The work consists of a video-dance piece to be recorded with the support of Casa Árabe in different spaces within the Casa Mudéjar (Casa Árabe’s headquarters in Cordoba), the city of Cordoba, Mexico City and Cordoba (Veracruz). The common thread uniting the piece will be the artistic vision that two women, Patricia herself and Mexican artist Lila Zellet-Elías, director of “Al-Andalus in Mexico,” have of Al-Andalus as a cultural imaginary and territory for various types of survival. Álvarez will record footage for the piece at locations around the city of Cordoba, Spain, while Zellet-Elías will do so in places with a Moorish influence in Mexico. Using resources that include dance, music and the spoken word, a work will be created in which we see these two vantage points framed within spaces and territories that form part of these recreated imaginaries, and which may also be viewed as tangible and intangible forms of survival from other eras. The result of this creative artist-in-residency program will be put on display at Casa Árabe in the near future.
Patricia Álvarez has a bachelor’s degree in Arabic Philology and Islam (UAM, Madrid, 1999). An eclectic dancer, her dance style combines traditional styles from the Mediterranean region with contemporary dance and flamenco. As a student and researcher of body language and gesture in cultural traditions, she constantly travels to different places for her research (including countries like Egypt, Morocco, Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Turkey).
Trained in flamenco at the “Amor de Dios” school in Madrid, one of the epicenters in the study of this art, Granada is the city where she discovered the clear presence of an underlying Arab foundation in certain aspects of flamenco dance.
Passionate about dance in general and the study of the body in motion, she has delved into other more academic dance styles like ballet and contemporary dance. She has also come into contact with the world of “theatrical dance” by way of different approaches, adding a contemporary concept to her way of working with traditional dances, which she has captured through her dance company “DESveladas Danza,” created in 2017, and in the work she has carried out with Iranian musician Kaveh Sarvarian, also known as “Kereshmeh.” She created the radio program “Taraful” and a blog in which she reflects upon her thoughts and discoveries, seeking an integration of the art of dance for audiences from different locations.