MARÍA PAGÉS COMPAÑÍA: PARAÍSO DE LOS NEGROS

Paraíso de los negros is a flamenco choreography that draws its lifeblood from the tension between the principles of freedom and authority that run through Poeta en Nueva York by Federico García Lorca, from the essence of opposites distilled in the namesake work by Carl Van Vechten, from the earthy philosophy of négritude by Léopold Sédar Senghor, and from the affirmation of Black desire by Nina Simone. Negritude becomes here a semantically complicit echo, where the same eternal conflicts resound—those that keep humanity hostage to its own asymmetric nature.

Paraíso de los negros is a work about the perpetual search for happiness. It explores the boundaries and limitations of human nature which, in the form of different faces, muddy and pollute the path to the right to desire. It probes the figures and appearances—always fluid and elusive—that suffocate the breath of free will, and it enters into dialogue with those barriers that fall like a guillotine on the neck of utopias or rise like images, thoughts, and feelings that become insurmountable walls to invisibilize the Other. The Other as an extension of desire, not as an enemy. Here, Lorca’s principle of freedom is a bird trapped on a twig smeared with glue.