Un cadavre exquis II, a dance solo by Pau Aran and José Troncoso, is a work focused on finding the meeting point, the direct link with our ancestors; offering a debt of gratitude in a subtle, tentative manner which is sometimes abstract.

Three perspectives, three aspects of  life (past, present and future) make their mark on our histories. The absences that accompany and surround us continue to inform our daily lives even though they do not physically exist because of time or space. Sometimes, depending on the circumstances, they can become as disturbing and alluring as ghosts. Ghosts, as a metaphor, suggest both absence and presence, paradoxically. A ghost is a kind of force, an entity that can return.

Pau tells us about himself, his life, his family and the things that move him, from his career as a ballroom dancer, through modern jazz to becoming a member of Pina Bausch’s company in Wuppertal. At the same time, his body, feeling alluded to, does not describe these situations but dances, seemingly freely, the emotions they produce in him.

Pau Aran’s movements communicate with every fibre, drawing the dance as a corporal poetry whose richness of expression has many and very different registers.

The title of the solo refers to a playful method developed by the surrealists that allows for the element of chance in creation and thus challenges the viewer’s power of interpretation. Pau is fascinated by surrealist art and how it interacts with the unconscious and the unspoken. He also finds the relationship between craft and dance particularly stimulating and inspiring; both use matter, the body and repetition in a similar way. But undoubtedly the most important common ground for him is the transmission of information through time; which lies latent across the generations.

Inspired by the craft of movement and gesture in dance, this piece explores the necessity of acknowledging places, people and experiences that we continuously interact with, as the very essence of our being. Identity intervenes; needing to be welcomed and taken into consideration. The images follow one after the other, the characters emerge. Everything is there, visible or not; tangible or not.

When we leave here, what remains as the essence of a whole life?