Galician contemporary dance takes flight.
While here it continues to be the least programmed discipline, Galician contemporary dance is reaching major milestones by establishing a presence abroad and earning recognition internationally. One only has to look, for example, at all the Galician works that have won different awards at the Madrid Choreographic Competition, competing alongside companies and artists from across Spain.
Between 20 and 24 August, Lugo-based Colectivo Glovo, formed by Esther Latorre and Hugo Pereira, took Alleo to the Dance Bridges Festival in Kolkata, India, where they presented the piece and held several meetings with audiences, speaking about their creations and their inspiration in traditional Galician rhythms and dances. Now, in 2026, as the company celebrates its tenth anniversary, and true to its name, it is taking dance created in Galicia all around the globe. In February, the company was in Seattle, in the United States, where it presented Alleo and Alén, the co-production by the Centro Coreográfico Galego/Xunta de Galicia that amazed me so much at its premiere at Teatro Ensalle. While there, it also developed a new creation with a Seattle-based company. And, according to the article published here on 30 August in the digital edition of erregueté, during this same year, 2026, the company has also been in Ecuador with Alén and in Italy with Alleo; this September it is heading to New Orleans with Alleo and Trïade, and will soon return to Indonesia. What dance and Lugo’s Colectivo Glovo manage to achieve in terms of flying around the world is more than Galicia’s three airports put together!
No sooner has Colectivo Glovo returned from Asia than Kirenia Danza is taking off for the Americas to present its beautiful and compelling Cicatriz at the prestigious Teatro San Martín in Buenos Aires. A co-production by the Centro Coreográfico Galego/Xunta de Galicia, the piece will be performed twice, on 19 and 20 September, as part of the FIBA 2026 programme. The Buenos Aires International Festival is a major reference point for the performing arts in Latin America and is organised by the government of Argentina’s capital city.
Cicatriz is the first dance piece from Galicia to integrate and address disability through a poetic impulse that avoids both victimhood and the exhibitionism of physical limitations. It therefore does not unsettle us with dystopias derived from the body, nor does it feed our morbid curiosity by opening wounds and sticking a finger into them only to twist it sadistically. No!
On the contrary, Cicatriz rides on the great forces that move the body: affection and desire, and their beauty, symbolised by the red dress and the elegant movements of Kirenia Martínez Acosta. Cicatriz is the beauty of all the scars that make us wiser and more symbiotic, fuller of life. It therefore puts forward a paradoxical thesis and practice: in it, wounds do not diminish us, separate us or make us smaller, but instead transform us and propel us forward. Cicatriz is the beauty of the power of desire, expressed through that other dance of words made up of Antón Reixa’s three hundred verses. Reixa makes his debut as a dancer, putting his body up against ageism at the age of 69, and against disability, living with the effects of a road accident that left him with an officially recognised physical disability of 65%. Alongside him, Kirenia, aged 46, also takes to the stage after serious accidents left her with cervical injuries and fibromyalgia, none of which prevents her from continuing to be a formidable dancer.
So, having clarified these political circumstances, if it is indeed true that the personal is political, we can ask ourselves once again: what is Cicatriz, beyond being the piece that is about to cross the Atlantic and shine on one of the most legendary stages? A miracle that makes pain disappear and allows difficulties to be overcome? Perhaps so. It is the miracle of poetry and dance, of resilience and the resistance of artistic vocations that think through the body, that embody utopias, while their work draws astonishment and smiles across our faces, even provoking the occasional burst of laughter. Reixa is always humour, but not joke-based humour. It is another kind of humour: one that plays with the surprise of imagination, that provokes reflection by turning things upside down or pushing boundaries.
Cicatriz is the miracle of poetry made dance and dance made poetry, emancipating us from limitations and disabilities without denying them. It is embodied utopia, turned into movement, made corporeal and present and, in this sense, it is the seed of revolution: an empirical and moving demonstration that where there is a will, there is a way. Argentina had better take note!