Marcos Morau & La Veronal

The stage is reminiscent of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. A museum guard watches the visitors as they look at the paintings. He observes the viewers suspiciously as they gaze at a stark naked woman draped in bed, her sex positioned exactly in the center: Titian’s famous painting, “Venus of Urbino.”

Venus looks back at them without shame. And we are just as shamelessly scrutinized by the museum attendant: any one of us could be a painting slasher or potential iconoclast in disguise.

That is the starting point. The attendant, otherwise known as Manuel Rodriguez, begins his dance. His arms scissor like a garden shears, his legs splay dangerously in a manner that you would only otherwise see in the highly accelerated ballets of William Forsythe. The dancing is excellent. On top of that, a thriller is now hurtling towards the audience. A female visitor will die as she gazes into the Titian painting. A stretcher is wheeled in, a body bag is opened and then zipped around her body. Her corpse will later plunge from the stage sky.

Valencia native and author of this never-boring adventure Marcos Morau hails from a region where even well-known ballet companies such as Ángel Corella’s were forced to declare bankruptcy a few years ago. So the then 28-year-old fled to Barcelona, where there was still the prospect of money and international connections. A good move, even if Catalan nationalism is not too fond of the Spanish from the south.

In Valencia, Marcos Morau was initially what you might call a budding ballet dancer – a student at the barre who soon realized that he would never be skilled enough to become a top dancer. His interests were too diverse, encompassing the visual arts, literature, and films. His curiosity was insatiable and his body couldn’t contain it all. He wanted everything at once, and it is only possible to live everything at the same time if you are very agile, with your eyes everywhere like a museum guard; your limbs everywhere like the dancers in William Forsythe’s pieces; your body everywhere, like one who travels the world, from Russia and Iceland to Japan and Oregon. His imagination ran away with him, and he bridled it by studying. For him, dancing and traveling are not mutually exclusive. For him, experiencing adventure and inventing the world go hand in hand: on every stage he can access. Movement is not just in the body, but also in the mind. That is how he embarked on a career that would soon take him around the world several times.