Eduardo Barba + Antonio Ruz | Good Herbs: a danced conference

IMAE and Festival FLORA achieve a very particular symbiosis: that of the gardener, landscaper and botanical researcher in works of art Eduardo Barba and the choreographer and stage director Antonio Ruz. Both give voice and movement to the surprising reality of urban plants, in a new format that we call “dancing conference.”

Good Herbs tells us about all those plants that appear in the city, on its streets and sidewalks, on the facades and in the abandoned houses, and that remind us that the city was a countryside, and that we are the intruders, not them. With his close and didactic style, Eduardo Barba tells us the most beautiful stories of urban flora (plants that do the impossible so that their daughters grow in more fertile soils than the mother, roots that associate with certain microorganisms to overcome the toxicity of the medium…), and the Antonio Ruz Company turns his words into dance and movement, paying homage to the plasticity of nature’s forms. If sometimes the most surprising nature grows in a crack at the foot of a lamppost, on occasions like this perhaps the dance tells stories and draws concepts like the most elaborate of stories or essays.

Credits
Artistic direction: FLORA
Text and reading: Eduardo Barba
Stage direction and choreography: Antonio Ruz
Dance and choreographic collaboration: Lucía MMontes, Mado Dallery y Alicia Narejos
Lighting design: Olga García
Sound space: Aire
Lighting technician: Cristina Cejas
Costumes and scenography: Compañía Antonio Ruz