Marcos Morau

I met him for the first time during a guest performance of his early work “Siena” in Gran Canaria. Morau was half embarrassed, half audacious, but also amazed at the sudden hype surrounding his company La Veronal. In 2013, the family of ten, as he affectionately calls his troupe, dined at long restaurant tables in a narrow lane in the old town district of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. They had previously presented their surreal play, a crime thriller with steel biers and women in grey fencing outfits, at Teatro Cuyas. Their wide strides developed a great deal of choreographic violence. Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” sent its regards. Ballet with a thrill: a combination I had never encountered before.

A painting of paradise by Jan Brueghel the Elder in the early 17th century shows animals in the foreground and people in the background. In front of them, women dance their delight, transforming themselves into animals that are soon kicking on their backs like beetles.

Marcos Morau makes friends easily. He shook hands and immediately shook his head at this guest at the table who had flown to the Canary Islands just to see his work. The handshakes and headshakes followed one after the other like one act after the next. I learned that Morau is fascinated by such capers – the quick change, the surprising turn of events. He finds performers simply too slow to achieve this. Dancers are much better at encouraging the audience to see everything a bit more quickly and perceive it with a bit more focus.

In “Siena,” you almost become a museum guard yourself, watching like a lynx, even though people continue to die behind the guard’s back during the piece, and even though they can steal the Venus of Urbino right before our eyes. Don’t worry, the original is in Florence. The piece is named “Siena” after what was once the richest city in Italy. It was only when the city was devastated by the plague that Florence had the chance to flourish, the Uffizi was built, and Titian became famous. Morau believes that death is a great master. He will repeat this sentence years later in a completely different way.

Admittedly, I never met Marcos Morau in Barcelona, where he founded his company La Veronal in 2005 and embarked on his career as a choreographer of such inextricably enigmatic film noir-style picture puzzles. In any case, he is hardly ever there. We last spoke in Milan in a park called Parco Sempione, on the edge of which stands the Triennale Milano. For two and a half months of the year, the stage of this museum belongs to the greats of contemporary choreography – among them Marcos Morau, who, almost ten years after our first meeting in the Canary Islands, is now seeing his works performed almost simultaneously to audiences in Trento, Freiburg, and Hannover, and is occupied producing several premieres in Ghent, Geneva and Paris almost at once. A man forced to be one of the greatest logisticians among choreographers, constantly having to ensure that nothing slips away from him, who keeps accepting new premieres. The world wants his new sensations.

He is currently showing his latest work in Milan, a piece bearing the German title “Totentanz – Morgen ist die Frage” (Dance of Death – Tomorrow is the Question). In 2020, the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija hung the simple sentence “Morgen ist die Frage” under the eaves of Berlin’s world-famous Berghain club in reference to the Ornette Coleman song “Tomorrow is the Question.” In Berlin, the question of tomorrow is currently the question of the future of art in the face of the current demise of theaters and clubs. Meanwhile in Milan, Umberto Angelini, director of the Triennale, asks: How can it be that Berlin is sacrificing its world-famous cultural and nightlife, the one thing it is known for in the world?

Marcos Morau doesn’t ask questions; he does what he does best – he dissects. Not just the movements of his dancers, but also the question of death. Because death is a criminal case. It is illegal. Every evening, we are haunted by TV images of suffering, an indecent sensation. Death is the reason for investigations, for commissioners. And it is the cause of art. Death is among us.

The dancers emerge from the audience. They listen to the dying conversation of the spectators with a microphone on a boom. They enter the stage’s apse.

Two corpses lie on the floor, wrapped in cellophane. A third is examined on the stretcher: an old woman with white hair, her mouth wide open. The microphone searches in vain for her last words. The old woman is a doll, lifelike. She resembles the two corpses waiting on the floor for their autopsy – or rather for their plundering, down to the last hair. A removed gold tooth clatters onto a tray.

In the background, a dancer lights a pile of brushwood that smokes and crackles in his arms.

One of the corpses rises up: the dancer Lorena Nogal, protagonist in almost all of Marcos Morau’s pieces. She hardly differs from the dead puppets. She waves incense, turns on a record player and dances to a classic lament, Johann Sebastian Bach’s song “Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden” (“When I must depart from here”). Her dress billows out like a bell as she pirouettes. Even her costume is dancing.

Her dress pirouettes into the shape of a bell. Her costume also dances along.

The industrious Marcos Morau would not be so sought-after in the dance world if he did not choreograph every gesture meticulously to the composition of his fellow countrywoman Clara Aguilar, embellishing it with a metallic sound and transforming every movement into a cleanly structured, expressive sign as hard and precise as the drumbeats of Lorena Nogal. Nogal noisily enters the audience while three gentlemen in black robes dance with the two old dolls on stage and wave a black flag – the flag of death.

At the front of the stage, three men in black robes dance with the two old dolls and wave a black flag, the flag of death.

In a previous version, this scene took place in the Real Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid – not in the theater, but in the wide open spaces of the museum itself; at the “Temporada Alta” festival in Girona, it unfolded in a chapel where the audience was allowed to move about freely. Following this, it was performed at home in Barcelona and now in Milan as the premiere of the tourable version for a sedentary auditorium.

Morau defies the laws of theater. He uses a film that brushes aside dance, a dance of images, quickly edited and made up entirely of drawings: the flag-bearers from just now, the slogan “Morgen ist die Frage,” which was emblazoned at Berghain during the pandemic, and a bomb that destroys the club. In addition, a series of video clips: a dancing Trump, a Black man beaten by police, refugees harassed by soldiers, mass shootings, 9/11, assassination, explosion, rat, Hitler, reporter under fire, Netanyahu, a kneeling pope, Gaza, mass exodus, Afghans desperately chasing after the last plane on the tarmac…

Meanwhile, Lorena Nogal has hidden under the stretcher. She emerges holding her two dead doppelgangers in her arms. Stunned, the real and the puppet ensemble fall to the ground, twist their limbs, buckle, and then rear up as Nacho Ignacio Fizona Camargo gets rid of the cutaneous and the queer citizen is thrown down the stairs backwards, ending as a victim of violence as in front of a club called the Berghain. An associate artist of the Staatsballett Berlin, led by Christian Spuck, Marcos Morau likes to dance here when he is in Berlin. He dances here so that he doesn’t have to worry about tomorrow. As he danced in the club, he says, he suddenly felt how much this world suffered and was destroyed. What protects the dance, he thought, are “these very thick walls, so that we are not affected by what is happening. But death does not care about walls, nor about borders.” It was precisely this thought about his piece that captured him in Berghain – at a moment when Berlin was giving its own culture up to death like a spring sacrifice.

Morau is part of the independent theater scene. He began realizing his art in Barcelona without money, without opportunities or support, but with craftsmanship, a wealth of ideas, and also several role models. Among the latter, he counts the British company DV8, led by Lloyd Newson – a master who tells great stories in the here and now without words. Other role models include the Italian Alessandro Sciarroni, a contemporary Marcel Duchamp among all those choreographers inspired by the visual arts, and, of course, William Forsythe with his unceasing urge to free dance from the cuteness trap. The Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who once said that he could only make art thanks to this ugly, unfair world and this completely imperfect country, also comes to mind. He was referring to Russia.

In Gran Canaria, Morau explained how he uses “dance as the most fluid medium” to
“make stories flounder.” At the time, he was taking part in the choreographers’ competition. A theater board of directors is always included as part of the jury. It awards first prizes and first commissions to newcomers to enable them to create new works under the protection and of these companies and with the money they provide. That’s how Morau got started: Bruno Heynderickx, then artistic director of Carte Blanche in Bergen, Norway, helped him to stage his 2015 premiere of “Edvard” based on the painter Edvard Munch, who was ostracized by the occupying Nazis in Oslo in 1940 and forced to resurrect himself in a straitjacket in his own paintings, in what the painter himself described as a crystal realm of terror and death.

A year later, Morau followed Heynderickx to the Wiesbaden Opera, of which the latter had been appointed director. It was here that Heynderickx produced Ariadna. Åsa Söderberg of Skånes Dansteater in the port of Malmö, who had also been on the jury, produced his “And to dust you shall return.” After she had left the management of the theater, his Carnival of the Animals was also created there in 2021.

Morau also had a mentor: Cesc Casadesús. The cultural manager, now part of the team at Teatre Lliure in Barcelona, ran the city’s Grec Festival until 2024 and, at the time of Marcos Morau’s meteoric rise, was the director of the only Spanish dance house, the Mercat de les Flors, which was housed in the old flower market in Barcelona. Casadesús had already met Morau when he was a student at the Institut del Teatre in the Catalan capital and had been struck by the determination of the aspiring choreographer, who had just returned from New York. Morau had spent half a year there at the “Movement Research” dance laboratory in Greenwich, a place dedicated to the history of postmodern dance in the United States. “I was there long after the attack on the Twin Towers, but people were only concerned with Merce Cunningham and Bill T. Jones, with the dance heritage. I felt that the city was just living in the past. But I wanted the future – in this city that was always believed to represent the future.”

New York no longer represented the future, but Barcelona did. And Copenhagen beckoned too. The Copenhagen International Choreography Competition launched his career by opening the door to a state theater for the first time for the independent company La Veronal: In 2018, he created Carmen for the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen. This was his first experience with the labor-intensive machinery of such a theatrical factory. Here, he worked with 50 dancers. It was an amazing experience for him.

Six years later, in February 2024, now at the Teatro Real in Madrid, the well- oiled ballet machine purrs along under his direction as cheerfully as if the visually stunning crime dance theater of his early days had been effortlessly resurrected as a giant vaudeville. Forty-four legs at the edge of the stage, a mass ensemble of ladies and gentlemen who, from an early age, have stamped, clapped, clacked, and drummed through the art of flamenco.

For this troupe, all of them cross-dressing with lipstick and nail polish, Morau seems to have longed for nothing more than to cast the overwhelming effect of flamenco in an almost black-and-white, almost photographic tableau in this almost two-hour choreography titled “Afanador.” The work is presented as a theater machine, driven by the sensitive music of Juan Cristóbal Saavedra, which compels the audience to dance along with the gigantic flamenco battle unfolding before them, sitting with their knees bouncing non-stop.

There is hardly a moment to catch one’s breath, with ever-new choreographic variations that begin in the imaginary photo studio of Colombian fashion and dance photographer Ruvén Afanador. This master once touched the Spanish flamenco soul deeply with two series of photos. Afanador admires the rigor of the dancers, this determined power of the body to make other bodies react, this art so cruelly furrowed by traditions and schools, faith and religion.

Marcos Morau also reveres flamenco, condensing the art into a ritual in strictly black costume, feather skirts, enormous hats, coats, and arranging them in phalanxes, on rows and circles of chairs, placing them behind a curtain lowered to knee height to focus the view on the filigree footwork. He confronts the ensemble with harsh lights, sharp shadows, and a projection by the Catalan artist Marc Salicrú. In this piece, there is a ruler, macho and powerful, who laboriously establishes himself. He lies down in front of a house wall, on whose balcony – in the style of folk art – a lady lets down her endless hair. Ivy grows out of his heart and up the wall, staining the lady onto whom the painting is projected with flamenco fans that turn into weeping eyes, then into the eyes of a bull. When another dancer raises his arms, they lengthen on the wall to become enormous wings, forming claws and making room for a group of men advancing arm in arm in the Dabke step, the democracy of closed ranks, to finish off the old ruler, who climbs out of a box in chains.

La Veronal is a tight-knit community that Morau smuggles into the large theater companies. Where does the name La Veronal come from? “It has to do with my admiration for Virginia Woolf,” Morau replies, “Her way of thinking, the way she combines reality and fiction, inspires me. In Woolf’s biography, I read that she tried to take her own life with Veronal several times. The sleeping pill owes its name to the following anecdote: One of the inventors had tried it out on himself during a train journey and had not woken up in Basel as planned, but in Verona. He had simply slept through.” Named after this, Morau’s company performs as a collective in an opera house like the Teatro Real. Juan Cristóbal Saavedra’s physically demanding composition, featured in “Afanador,” can also be found in La Veronal’s frequently touring independent productions such as “Firmamento,” created in 2023.

The costume art of Silvia Delagneau, who has been tailoring her dance costumes from folkloric garments since La Veronal’s earliest pieces, has become the company’s trademark, most particularly her skirts, which expand to church bell proportions during the dervish dance. Roberto Fratini, a professor of dance theory and dramaturgy at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona, where Morau also studied for a time, is the company’s permanent dramaturg. The dancer Lorena Nagel becomes the ballet mistress in all the companies that invite this troupe to perform. Max Glaenzel designs the spaces. In addition to Jon López and Miguel Angel Cobacho, the core team also includes Shay Partush from Israel, the assistant choreographer on “Romeo and Juliet,” which is due to come out in Ghent in 2025 and on “Night Dreams,” which premiered in Zurich in 2024. Morau explains how Partush, who is the assistant, was asked where he was from by a woman at a public rehearsal in Antwerp. “He said he was from Israel. The woman said, ‘Your country is fucking me.’ He said, ‘But I’m not in Israel, I’m here.’”

Morau sides with Dante. The world is my fatherland, a world whose regions are at war – Gaza, Congo, Ukraine, which are being secretly or openly accused of simply not protecting themselves from death. For Morau, the point is “that we simply accept the death of others, that we even accept that we don’t care about death at all if it doesn’t affect us.” Death is the drama. Since Siena, Morau’s work has been about dying: witnesses die, those in the know die, heroes and heroines, Romeo and Juliet, Edvard Munch and the innocent. The theater is a risky game of survival, not just a danced ritual. Morau is genuinely shocked by how trivialized death is in the news, as if, as he says, we “want to create an emotional condom” that ensures “that, in the face of the omnipresence of death, we always act as if we simply cannot see it: all the victims in Gaza, in Ukraine, at the borders of the USA.”

Morau is a political choreographer who sometimes illustrates his concern for democracy in a very symbolic way, such as his use of set designer Max Glaenzel’s swaying columns in the 2024 piece “Overture” at the Berlin State Ballet. In 2022, he leaned over Kurt Jooss’ “Green Table” for his work “Nachtträume” (‘Night Dreams’) at the Zurich Ballet, drawing the inhuman actions of the potentates and their narcissistic business practices with weapons, lands, and industries in a glaringly updated form. Once again, Max Glaenzel was the costume and set designer for this piece, which is set in the period leading up to Hitler’s rise to power, around the time of the 1932 production of “The Green Table.” It is a horrifyingly consistent aesthetic farewell to Western culture, to a world that will completely devalue death, and likewise its art.

Morau talks about how he grew up in a Spain that didn’t talk about death. “When my father died, my mother only told me that he was dying ten days before it happened. She didn’t want to see me suffer – she wanted to spare me. In Spain, because of Catholicism or whatever, the belief was that death should remain a mystery; it should be locked out of life.” Since his father’s death, his parents’ wedding rings have dangled from his necklace under his shirt, an amulet that accompanies him, “and of course, during the premieres, I hold them in my hand.”

Whether they are about his predecessors like Kurt Jooss, the medieval dance of death, great painters or small escapes into the world, his works are always carefully thought out and extensively researched. Like Pina Bausch, Morau also initially named his pieces after places he had been or dreamed of going to. In 2014, “Nippon-Koku” alluded to the fascist regime in Japan during the Second World War. “For me, it was about the question of individual freedom. Everyone wants to control, wants to give people a law, wants to force them to obey a law, whether it is a good law or not. Especially in Japan, I see the extent to which people submit to laws and customs. There are so many rules there that it is impossible for individuals to act freely.”

In addition to “Siena,” there were also pieces called “Bologna Pasolini,” “Tundra,” “Islandia,” “Moscow,” “København,” “Portland” – all dream journeys that “take you to a place that is close to reality, but not really real.”

Also in 2014, a piece called “Russia” was created, which Morau staged like a road movie “in which a couple drive towards Lake Baikal, get lost, and separate. That’ s all that happens. As in any good road movie, the only thing that matters is the process of change. This journey was accompanied by all the clichés of Russian folk dance with a Siberian bear, balalaika music, the long darkness, the alcohol, a Russia in which one becomes another, with another dream of oneself, other expectations, other relationships, and today…” he pauses: “Today we only see Putin, and I think how beautiful was the innocence with which I could think about this country in my late twenties. I like the people there. I can’t simply say that Russia is terrible just because it is governed terribly.”

Not many people have experienced these early works by Marcos Morau. Far more have witnessed the phase in which he clearly referred to visual art. There was “Picasso” and especially “Voronia” from 2015, his second major tour success after “Siena.” Voronia is the name of a deep cave in Georgia that Morau and his troupe visited. With Dante, they asked: What or where is evil? Black-and-white figures appear in front of a gray curtain; short volleys of clapping hands accompany projected words, all of them Gnostic set pieces from the prophet Ezekiel. Behind glass, surgeons in an operating room bend over a human body; a boy with bloody hands is locked in a glass case. Monks dressed in dark robes stride across the stage. Both animal puppets and real animals appear in this valley of withered bones.

Glass windows become elevator doors, behind them a table set for a Last Supper. It all seems so pictorial, but it is in fact choreographed at an extraordinary pace. A Chinese woman curses the company at the table in Mandarin, she wants to escape from them, wants to take the elevator, in which increasingly strange things lurk: a military in combat gear, some naked people, a young Messiah who is being tailored a suit. Suddenly there is a polar bear sitting at the table, which the boy with the bleeding hands rediscovers in a coffin at the end. Morau captivates and hypnotizes with this sequence of seemingly underground violence, claustrophobia, and beauty, reminiscent of El Greco and the black paintings produced by Goya when he was confined to his house in his deafness, of quiet Japanese anime, of Luis Buñuel’s “Angels of Death.”

Ignorant people who don’t understand art are the real destroyers. This is followed by a performance by monks, a subtle allusion to the iconoclastic period in the history of Byzantium during the 8th century: the destruction of icons, the banning of the depiction of God, measures against freedom of art. Without fear of Islamic-looking ornamentation, the dancers delve deeply into Rothko’s abstract art. A very typical work by Morau, a complexly-staged example of endless reflection that does not wag a finger, but is still full of dramaturgical furor and precisely choreographed down to the tips of the toes. Then, after “Le Surréalisme au service de la Revolution” for the Ballet de Lorraine, Morau created another homage to Luis Buñuel in Barcelona in 2020 – the work “Sonoma.”

“Sonoma” is a true celebration. The strict order of flamenco is caught between pain and liberation, choreographed this time in such a wildly fantastic combination for the dancers that it demands the highest level of skill: not a single step, thought or gesture is repeated. A dancer must first memorize this wealth of material and steps, especially since the logic of the step, in keeping with its surrealism, constantly seeks to evade its own logic.

The stage canopy lowers ominously, nine women in white dresses beat heavy drums the size of washing baskets, beating furiously, upright, louder and more urgently, beating faster before the canopy falls on their heads. Before that, a coffin is once again enthroned in the middle of the stage. The dancers, as if uniformed in their severe bell-shaped skirts, perform their steps so softly that their shoulders never swing. It looks as if they are moving across the stage on roller skates.

With huge flower arrangements in their hair, they raise a choral song in many voices in front of the coffin. Eerie things are said about the Promised Land, the sword of Damocles, the key to all doors that will remain closed forever. Fists raised to the sky nestle against the headscarf of the woman in front a few seconds later. Ornamental body lines are driven by rhythms and folk dance-like movements. Everything spills over from one order into the next. Morau shows the picture as a choreographed machine. The next moment, this is contrasted by two old women who dance, wearing masks several meters tall on their small bodies.

The next moment, this is contrasted by two old women who dance, wearing masks several meters tall on their small bodies.

One mourner kneels down, then another, each with a luminous ball in her hand. Their kneeling before the coffin immediately tips over into childlike blissful exuberance. The music machine booms along incessantly, keeping exactly to the pulse despite all the shifts in rhythm and driving this surreal cinematic show in the mind like an old film projector. It is a fairytale world, but this does not mean it has the romantic source that forms the repertoire of most large companies. Rather, the aim of Marcos Morau’s choreographic exertion is to transform image into movement. Like photography which, when the shutter clicks, does not kill the movement but emphasizes it and makes it appear larger.

Morau studied photography, partly because his grandfather was a photographer – one who still worked with heavy plates, gelatin, and fixer. Morau was fascinated by the studio full of his photographs from an early age; it cast a spell on him. He does not come from a family of artists. Only his grandfather had this trait: the love of composition, the hope of catching the best moment, the right view, the aesthetic pleasure in balance, color saturation, and pictorial composition. Many of the poster motifs for La Veronal also come from Morau’s own camera.

The last time we speak, in a simple kitchen room at the Milan museum stage, he is 41 years old. He is lively, but also exhausted. He is looking for more time for himself and openly reflects on the constraints of the business in which he has found himself. “There is this hype around me, and I just happen to be the right age to fill it and endure it.” He perceives the theater as a power structure built around a triangle: talent, luck, and work, as he says. “I’m lucky because I have friends. I also work a lot, but I still don’t know what talent means. Maybe talent is just the drive to do all of this. The work also never lets me forget where I come from – from the independent scene. The big theaters are constantly looking for the latest and most fashionable thing. And to that end, they want you to feel like you belong there, that you accept their rules, that you like them.”

He involuntarily tells me what he thinks when he thinks of his other project, his choreography for “Romeo and Juliet” in Ghent, which is scheduled to open in just three weeks. “Romeo and Juliet” is about the “impossibility of love, about what seems impossible today, not what seemed impossible in the 15th century. But what is impossible today?”

And what is tradition? Is there a traditional “Romeo and Juliet” ballet? “Real traditions,” he says after a moment’s thought, “are friendship, solidarity, working together, the existence of tasks that you expect of yourself and others. All these are traditional forms, because that is how we live together. It is a tradition that is practiced, passed on, handed down from one generation to the next, like all the old paintings, like the old folklore, like the old songs. Of course, things change; time changes. And the balance of power changes. It was General Franco in Spain who gave these traditions of the community a religious slant, who wanted to use the power of the church for himself, who invented processions of the estates and liked to see the faithful transfer their devotion to the fascist state. Yes, you can redefine traditions. Even in religion, it’s not about Mary, Christ or the saints, but first of all about very stupid things: an occasion to be allowed to dance, to stomp, to scream, to sing, to express our fear, which comes from the times when we lived in caves with the animals, when it was not about religion, but about survival. Religion was just clever, inventing answers to these imponderables. In this respect, it is no different from what art can do: inventing life.”

It’s amazing. Just a moment ago, Marcos Morau was trying to explain how he made his way into the major state theaters as a freelance choreographer. A second later, you see him at the kitchen table, a man who thinks very deeply about his constraints and the causes of constraints, as an artist in search of spaces of possibility. To realize: “It’s impossible: Art is not free. It is very dependent. Not only Franco, but also the Soviet Union used the art of the people, subordinated folklore to ballet in order to unite this multi-ethnic empire. That is why there was support for the arts in the Soviet Union – support for music, ballet, and also for sport. I went to Russia four times before the invasion of Ukraine to perform there with La Veronal. I was always fascinated by how strong folklore is there, so powerful that you get the feeling – as you sometimes do in Spain too – that art has stood still in time, that it is producing a museum effect out of itself: Oh, something like that still exists… you think. It is because of this tradition that politicians in Spain also like to surround themselves with artists – the mayors of Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid. Artists are supposed to support their candidacy so that some of their spirit rubs off on politics… You’re shaking your head?”

“I am shaking my head, yes,” I say, because I see no politics in this world that still cares about art, about the ability of human beings to accumulate anything other than capital. “Exactly – art is not free,” he says and smiles: ”But it is precisely from this lack of freedom that art draws its freedom.”