Trained in Spain at the Instituto del Teatro de Barcelona, Juan Carlos Garcia perfected his skills in contemporary dance in France, studying at the National Centre of Angers with Viola Farber and working from 1983 to 1985 in Jean-Claude Gallotta’s company. He then attended Merce Cunningham’s classes in New York, finally returning to Barcelona to work with the Gelabert-Azzopardi company in Dèsfigurat. His first creation with Lanònima Imperial, Eppur si muove, was in 1986. Dedicated to Galileo Galilei, it immediately brought Garcia’s young company great recognition, winning first prize at the Tortola Valencia Competition. Among the most incisive works signed in these twelve years are Castor I Pollux, Kairos, Afanya’t poc a poc, Eco de silenci, Moving landscape. Cuerpo de Sombra y Luz (1998) reworks Las Casas Del Olvido (1997), a project developed by Garcia in collaboration with Palma Navares, which was a story taken from the Universal History of Infomia (1935) by Jorge Luis Borges. Attributed by the Argentine writer to the Arab historian El Ixaquì, Story of Two Who Dreamed is an allegorical text that questions important themes such as faith and oblivion in relation to dream memory. The juxtaposition of elements is a constant in Garcia’s work. In his career he has reflected on the most varied relationships: light and darkness, unity and multiplicity, speed and slowness, love and death. Garcia dedicated Afanya’t poc a poc to this latter pair in the early 1990s, a work that already clearly exemplified the non-didactic approach to the themes of inspiration. The narrative cues were in fact diluted in chiaroscuro images, in which the emotional and dramatic quality of the love-death pairing was revealed in the dynamics of movement. “My attention,” the choreographer declared, “has always been focused on the importance of speed in the relationship between the physical movement of the dancers and the receptivity of the audience, a purely mental factor. The quantity of information connected to the composition of a sequence must adapt instantly to the receptive capacity of the spectator. In this way, situations, poetic relationships and emotions are created in his memory that force him to pay attention to what is happening on stage.” In Cuerpo de Sombra y Luz, the creative relationship between Navares and Garcia tightens, becoming the main inspiring engine of creation. Garcia in fact develops the choreography starting from the suggestions inspired by the art balanced between classicism and technology, dream and reality, of Navares, in turn Palma defines the scenographic space in relation to Garcia's way of understanding the relationship between space, dancer and audience. Palma Navares' work also deals with the rest of the ways of perceiving the body. Since the early 90s Navares has focused her attention on the female archetype, studying with a critical eye the way of representing the woman's body in the history of art. Her works focus on the fragment, as happens in dreams. Navares' choice to highlight some parts of the body, which take up classical masterpieces in fragments, finds an analogy with the memory processes of dreams, concentrated on revealing details. Navares explains: "I understand the fragment as part of a whole, but also as a whole in itself. Every part of the woman's body is a universe that generates life". Then, in perfect harmony with the poetics of Juan Carlos Garcia, he specifies his conception of the relationship between work and public: “I try to organize the information perceived by the spectator, establishing an emotional path. Because art is for me emotion and adventure. A sort of battle in no man’s land in which to fight the ghosts that revolve around our existence”.
