Antón Reixa dances his verses with Kirenia Martínez: "I managed to lose my sense of embarrassment"
- Pauloblue 1
- Mar 31
- 3 min read
One would risk sounding like a liar by claiming that Antón Reixa (Vigo, 1957) could ever feel embarrassed or ridiculous on stage. A vanguard poet before the age of 20; founder, lyricist, and lead singer of Os Resentidos, an emblematic band of the 1980s Vigo scene; television producer and host; columnist; radio presenter; film director and producer… Could someone with such a background truly see himself as odd or extravagant? To the point of unintentionally provoking laughter?
In 2016, Reixa suffered a serious car accident that left him in an induced coma for several days and resulted in chronic pain and a 65% physical disability. So when, at the age of 67, Cuban choreographer and dancer Kirenia Martínez invited him to go on stage and dance, he did, in fact, fear he might look ridiculous.
Martínez, who had already worked in Galicia on inclusive dance with elderly women in O Courel (Lugo) and Cuntis (Pontevedra), met Reixa in the Galician mountains during a poetry event where he was reading his work. “It was like watching Marlon Brando reading poems. I read them and decided to create a dance piece based on one of them without telling him, just in case he said no. I invited him to the premiere thinking that if he didn’t like it, I wouldn’t be able to continue. It was a risky move, but when it ended, he hugged me, emotional. He loved it,” the choreographer explains.
From that encounter was born Cicatriz (Scar), an interdisciplinary performance blending dance, theatre, performance art, poetry, installation, and music, structured around 300 verses by Reixa, all beginning with the word “Quiero” (“I want”), which, according to the creators, explore “desire and the desire to desire.” The two of them are the performers.
Emotion“My age and my ailments are hardly the best conditions for dancing. But since we began, I’ve not only managed to lose my sense of embarrassment. It’s been tough, but also physically liberating,” says Reixa. “I’ve discovered I can do things I thought were no longer possible. Dance is technique, yes, but above all, it’s emotion,” he adds.
The process of turning Reixa’s poems into choreography wasn’t easy either. Kirenia says her goal was “to make dance readable and poetry visible,” and she believes the author “has also discovered new things about his verses by seeing them in 3D.” “All I asked was to be allowed to interpret them, to make them mine and express them,” she says.
“Now I wonder, with fascination, how the poet will write after having danced his poetry,” the choreographer reflects. “How his verses will transform after inhabiting the words with his body, after dancing them, after discovering that moving within his own text is another way to verse life. Because when words submit to gravity, when they are articulated through flesh, something in their meaning fractures and expands. They are no longer just language: they become trace, gesture, pulse,” she concludes.
Cicatriz, produced by Fani Vázquez and Uxío Novo, features music by Marcos Payno and Bruno Baw, scenography by Suso Mareque, and the support of the Galician Agency for Cultural Industries and the Galician Choreographic Center. It premiered last Friday at the Germán Coppini Hall of the SGAE in Santiago and had a second performance on Saturday. The creators hope to take the show on tour to other parts of Galicia, Portugal, and Germany.