The days of Inaki Urlezaga they are long and intense in La Plata, his hometown. The assembly of his choreography for “Romeo y Julieta”, which premiered on June 28, took place amid the expectation of the Stable Ballet of the Teatro Argentino to return to the stage after seven years of closing the hall. Iñaki is dedicated to every detail: scenery, lighting, costumes, exchanges with the musical part and, of course, the choreographic design.
Surely so much attention to detail absorbed him during his ten-year career at the Royal Ballet in London. He was then twenty years old and had already danced as the first figure in the Colon Theater and before in the Argentine, but rubbing shoulders with the stars of the English company impregnated him with all the tradition of an exquisite repertoire.
The impetus of this stubborn and enterprising Sagittarius took him further: in 2000 he formed his first company, the Ballet Concert, and a few years later he began the fascinating task of creating choreographies. A lot of water passed under the bridge to its I retire as a dancer in 2018 at the Teatro Colón, precisely with “Romeo y Julieta” in the legendary choreography of Kenneth MacMillan.
Even though it was Monday, a day off at the Theater, it was difficult to get him to pause for the interview with NEWS.
News: Twenty years ago he started doing choreographies. What is he looking for as a choreographer?
Inaki Urlezaga: I think it’s in my genes. I do it from school events: once my third grade teacher told me that she had to play the clown. And I remember that I left my classroom turning, making a loop without stopping, to the middle of the patio, about fifty meters (laughs). I like to choreograph, for me choreography is psychoanalysis, the other always made me curious. Usually dancers look at themselves all the time, they don’t open their heads to look around. I always had a panoramic vision and that is what I continue to do. But, without a doubt, England radically influenced me when it came to conceptualizing the theatrical event, giving it perspective, intellectuality, emotion.
News: It is that there they have an enormous theatrical tradition.
Urlezaga: And dance is always very subject to the development of the story, to how it should be told. That experience is what gave me the foundations to do my choreographies, even the most abstract ones. For example, a long time ago I heard a sonata for violin and piano by Brahms, the third. I felt that something had to do with that music, I didn’t quite understand where I was going to shoot, but I always came back to it. The feminist movement has a legitimate force for me, and this music is so compulsive at times and so chaotic and beautiful at the same time, that I realized that the path was there. I put together a work on feminism, which seems abstract but is not, it has a underlying theme.
News: What do you think about feminism?
Urlezaga: Dance was always feminist, for dancers it is not something new that women have a voice and that they are strong. I think feminism came to break something, it’s a change of era. Women have said enough, the paradigms have changed, the verticality of the patriarchy has changed, everything is in question.
News: In his family there have been women who greatly influenced his career: his aunt Lilian Giovine who was his teacher, his sister Marianela who is his producer, his mother. How was that feminine universe in his life?
Urlezaga: I don’t need to do “The House of Bernarda Alba” because I already have it at home, it wouldn’t be something very creative (laughs). But my father has also had an enormous influence on me, he was a father with a lot of presence and few words, perhaps because of his personality or as a consequence of the above. He wasn’t invasive like the rest of the family, my dad would talk if you asked him. He had that distance from affection that one feels that he is waiting for you but not invading. The feminine world gave me art, my grandmother was a frustrated dancer who loved the theater. But there is something individual that makes you define what you want to be. I could have been a doctor, like my dad who was a pediatrician, and he tried to make me one. If there is something that we all agree on at home, it is that we are insistent (laughs). But he didn’t make it.
News: How do you remember your beginnings in London?
Urlezaga: I left as a teenager and when I arrived it was the golden age: Sylvie Guillem, Darcey Bussell, Irek Mujamedov, Viviana Durante… there was excellence wherever you look at it, there was great artistic wealth and that’s where I grew up. Every day I realize more of the importance of what it was to have had that beginning in dance. In 2000 the Royal Opera House was computerized and many more performances could be done. What seems positive leads to no rehearsal time, creation of works, deepening. Today everything is very serial, there is a ferocious exhaustion of artists, you cannot be in all the details, mature. The school stopped producing great figures, they hire international stars who know very little about the English repertoire, important things are being lost.
News: How is your experience with new artists?
Urlezaga: In the field of classical dance, I think there is a great lack of driving, a lot of pointless workYoung dancers have no idea why they are doing what they are doing, and some are not even interested in finding out. The necessary degree of truth is lacking in the representation, the profound way of telling a story. The work does not question today’s society, it is not in resonance with what the person goes to the theater to look for and what the artist provokes, it becomes old or misunderstood or passatista, which is the worst thing that can happen to us. It doesn’t happen in the contemporary, because the choreographers are generally alive. Having the creator alive is being inspired by that person, there is no way to replace that source of inspiration.
News: What do you think needs to be done to keep public interest active?
Urlezaga: The classics will always be there, for their beauty and their poetry. But you also have to look for works that have to do with today’s society. If you go to the theater and nothing happens to you, it’s like a couple, you decide to separate so as not to continue having a bad time, on top of that in the theater you have to pay a lot to have a bad time (laughs). You have to have the intelligence and understanding to speak to an audience that has different responses and stimuli. We have to adapt the message because the resources are different and also the aesthetics. The themes go hand in hand with social demand, the artist is an emerging artist who breaks away from society and has to be brave to tackle something that bothers and needs to be put on the table.
News: What is your place in the world?
Urlezaga: Don’t have. When I formed the National Ballet, I thought of having my base here in Argentina, it was my greatest wish, a base where I could always return and be able to be with people that you feed and that understand the language and the aesthetic way of recounting dance. I felt like I was building a place from which I could interact socially. After the government closed it in 2018, I didn’t want to build a space again. They hire me from a place and there I go and try to embrace each experience. For example, here in La Plata, the dancers have lost seven years of their career due to the closure of the theater, so the illusion of returning to the stage goes beyond the play. I am glad to accompany that festive moment, I am left with the experience of living it with them.
News: Future plans?
Urlezaga: Last year María Noel Riccetto invited me to do a tango choreography for the SODRE Ballet, a very eclectic cast. I went to give some classes to have clear ideas about the personality and characteristics of the dancers, and from there came “Estaciones Río de la Plata” with music by Piazzolla, which opens on July 26. It is an abstract ballet, without scenery, dark, that talks about some issues that happen on this side of the pond: violence, inequality, the lack of empathy for the other, it has to do with a social aspect. There is also violence in Astor’s music, he was an angry man, chaotic at times, and his music reflects his own history.
News: Why do you have to go see his version of “Romeo and Juliet”?
Urlezaga: Time passes and there is always something new to discover in this work. I danced the role of Romeo, but that of Juliet is another story. Nothing happens to Romeo, he risks for love, lives for love and dies for love, but it is a personal decision. He does it heroically, like the fourteen-year-old that he is. But what Juliet goes through to be free and happy with her true love is terrible. She has to rebel against that man who is her great oppressor, her father, who is the one who sets her destiny. That reality contrasted with today’s is no longer true, although until some time ago parents chose who their daughters were going to marry or approved their own choice. People keep coming to see this play, because it’s part of a world that we have to understand to say we don’t want it anymore.
