Toná is the new show of the contemporary dance company La Phármaco founded in 2009 by Spanish choreographer and dancer Luz Arcas. La Phármaco's dance is a state that belongs to the body, giving it back to the community - like symbols or memory - and a place to to which one aspires and reaches after a rigorous and refined project of domestication.

"To dance I give my life, my time, my ambitions"-comments the Malaga-based choreographer-"I dance to belong to something above me, in time and space, that is bigger than me, that welcomes me and saves me from wild individualism, from indifferent tribalism."

Toná is a multidisciplinary stage proposal that moves away from conventional narratives and introduces the viewer to a poetic experience that explores transience, death and memory. In this work, objects and scenic supports (the violin played live, the video, the body) are crossed by the invisible (music, image, movement) and shaken to the point of exhaustion: an excess of life that eventually exhausts them and returns them to the inert.

With Toná, Luz Arcas tackles one of the most introspective works of her career, the result of a creative process that she describes as a "liberation."

"Tonà was born during trips to Malaga to visit my father, who was very ill. In his house, where I grew up, I rediscovered references, icons, symbols that I had almost forgotten. I recalled anecdotes and fears, reconnecting with the folklore of my childhood. I wanted to dance a feeling that is typical of that folklore: death as a celebration of life and individual and collective catharsis."

The performance stems from the need to embody an identity that does not claim to define itself, organically linked to collective memory and popular imagination, with all its conflicts. A poem that conveys the flesh, the vital pulse, full of anger and joy, but also of prejudice and superstition. An ancient and fertile pain that shapes us slowly, from childhood.

A body reconciled with its life forces, entwined with illness, old age, death, and brazenly relating to symbols, to dirty them, trample them, rename them, while shouting: they are ours, they belong to us.

a performance by Luz Arcas, La Phármaco

co-produced with Festival de Otoño, Madrid