Blanca Li © Nino Bustos
At the Festival she brings Le Bal De Paris, an immersive experience that won the Golden Lion in the “Venice VR Expanded section” at the 78th Venice International Film Festival. Blanca Li defies easy categorisation. She is a choreographer, dancer, actress, director and performer. Perhaps the only way to describe her to people who are not familiar with her work is ‘designer of bodily movement’. Each of her works, from the legendary Macadam Macadam of ’99 to Robot of 2013 (universally recognised as the first dance experiment for humanoids), is a cultural melting pot in which stimuli from disparate geographies, eras and fields coexist, from fashion to science, from scientific technology to various musical expressions, from local history to global expressions. Blanca Li treads new cultural paths but always places the physicality of dancers (and not only) at the heart of her work, inspiring new reflections and finding fresh perspectives. She was the artistic director of the Centro Andaluso for dance. She splits her time between Spain – where she was born and directs los Teatros del Canal in Madrid – the United States and Europe: particularly Paris, where she resides. She has received the Legion of Honour, was appointed a member of the Ordre des Art et des Lettres and the Ordre Natino du Mérite and, in 2019, was elected as one of the three permanent members of the new choreography department.
Le Bal de Paris de Blanca Li
“Le Bal de Paris” is a celebration of the plurality of languages. But can technology really help art or even replace it?
What do you mean by technology? I have always used a lot of video, projections and ‘artificial’ sounds. After all, it is computer devices that recently enabled us to work even though we were based in cities all over the world. For me, everything I don’t know challenges me to implement something new, and I’m not afraid of that. It has to be at the service of creativity, and not the other way around, of course. For example, what I am concerned with now is creating emotions through machines. And Le Bal de Paris – which has a fairy-tale plot, and is deliberately childlike – draws on augmented reality where dancers in the flesh participate with the audience in the “other” dimension experienced through VR helmets. An original creative process originates from the triangulation of virtual reality, the dancers’ movements and those of the audience invited on stage to participate. Virtuality and reality can share the same destiny, as they seek a new poetic language.
In your desire not to be “defined” within a precise cultural box, you have also given a lot of importance to contemporary fashion, which is often dismissed by the cultural world…
I love fashion: I started working with fashion designers right from the start of my professional life. Azzedine Alaïa, Stella McCartney, Jean-Paul Gaultier. Fashion is an industry, but there are people working in fashion that I certainly could not call anything other than ‘artists’. For Le Bal de Paris, the inspiration came from operettas and traditional musicals. Then I wrote an original script transposed into an unreal and timeless universe, retro, futuristic, classical, contemporary and, above all, hallucinatory. It is a story in three acts whose protagonist is Adèle, an independent young woman who returns to Paris after travelling around the world. She attends a ball, organised by her father, where, among the guests, she meets her first love, Pierre. I asked Chanel to create an entire virtual collection and each participant was invited to choose one for their avatar to wear, so that they would feel completely immersed in the atmosphere. They were very cooperative and, above all, we had a lot of fun together.
What does an event like the Spoleto Festival mean for you?
The opportunity for a multitude of great artists to show what they do, but also to share their everyday life with their audience in a setting that is unparalleled anywhere in the world.
What do you think of the large female presence at this edition? Compensation for the historic neglect of women or a simply a fashionable gesture?
Neither one nor the other. It is an act of justice. For too long, the major cultural institutions and events have not sufficiently promoted the work of female directors, conductors, writers, scriptwriters, actresses, and so on… This is a problem, because I firmly believe in “the equality of difference”. The female point of view, fortunately, is often different from the male one. And I say ‘fortunately’ because the more ideas and opinions that are present in cultural conversations, the deeper the awareness and emotionality that can emerge and be cultivated among people.