Antón Reixa premieres ‘Cicatriz’ in Compostela to “challenge prejudices about the body”
- Mar 24, 2025
- 2 min read
Artist Antón Reixa and choreographer and dancer Kirenia Martínez Acosta premiere Cicatriz this weekend in Santiago de Compostela, a contemporary dance piece that brings one of Reixa’s poems to the stage to explore desire and “challenge prejudices about the body.”
Cicatriz is a poem by Antón Reixa composed of 300 verses beginning with the word “I want.” Like its stage adaptation, it reflects on the “essential desire to have desires,” in the author’s words. “When we no longer desire anything, we are broken,” he added during the presentation of the work.
The Germán Coppini Hall at the Fundación SGAE will host the premiere on March 28 and 29 at 8:30 p.m., with tickets already on sale. Afterwards, the performance will tour Germany and Portugal, with the possibility of additional dates in Galicia.
The show is co-produced by Artestudio and the Galician Choreographic Center, which highlights that this is the first time it has addressed inclusion in one of its productions, particularly in relation to age and disability.
During the presentation, Reixa showed two documents: his ID card confirming he is 67 years old and a certificate recognizing his 65% physical disability, a consequence of a car accident in 2016. “Neither my age nor my disability seem like the best premises for creating a performance with full professional rigor,” he explained.
The collaboration began after Martínez Acosta had already worked with some of Reixa’s texts. “I told him: ‘Antón, let’s work together.’ Although I tricked him a little,” she joked. He initially thought his role would be different: “He believed he would sit on a chair while I did everything,” Martínez Acosta recounted.
“That’s when my process began: turbulence and delirium,” explained the director of Cicatriz, referring to the four-month creative process that began in the poet’s home and followed a rhythm different from other projects, prioritizing respect for pain and vulnerability.
Reixa, for his part, thanked his partner’s “patience”: “She could be dancing with the best dancers but chose this beginner, with the price that she sometimes suffered during rehearsals.”
Learning and limits
In what he describes as a “long learning process,” the artist discovered that “contemporary dance is closely related to theatre.” “I learned things about my own literature, because rhythm is very important, and about my body as well. Doing this is therapeutic. I feel much better than when I started four months ago,” Reixa said.
During the process, both artists overcame barriers they initially expected to face. For Reixa, this was mainly physical: “She was able to lift me into the air, and I was able to do the same with her,” he explained, noting that the performance does not demand “technical exhibitionism.”
For Martínez Acosta, her “barrier was not the body but the artist and the idea of the artist we admire.” “Approaching him and entering that intimacy without falling into emotional clichés between us was important,” the dancer concluded.