Part of a 3 solos series, ‘Étude II’ explores beauty and the initiation of femininity, beyond binary codes. From the genderless and ambiguous transition from child to teenager to the violent journey to adulthood and then the final merging of identities at the end of our lives. Using specific movement sequences, Lou Gulli and Pau Aran were exploring several qualities through repetition and this coalesced into the image of a blooming flower. Finding that the love and study for movement is a present, as youth is, a present to be treasured and nurtured.

Sensuality is a fleeting imagined moment of possible reunions.

Coming, going, leaving and looking for where our childhood dreams went.

Moving through the oppositions of earth and air, her arms remind her of forgotten moments. Like a flower that opens and closes again, her hands splash with caresses and escape like fish that want to fly.

Flight, skill, lability… In this dance of shining beginnings and tender rebelliousness her ethereal image emerges as incomplete, anxious, in search of a certainty that seems not to exist. As if passing through the same path again would give her the hope of glimpsing an answer, of embracing once and for all her own yellow brick road. There, where doubts become hope, where the butterflies whisper into her ear, where the piano notes seem to propel her and guide her in the darkness.

But sometimes speed is an excuse for not wanting to look at ourselves in the mirror, for not being able to pass through the middle, for not really letting ourselves fall, for fearing the certainty of severe slowness.

So, to stop, to look, to step back, to feel the trail of your hair, to repeat letter by letter, gesture by gesture, is an invitation to concentration, to return to the origin, to discover again the here and now…