The Ruemania group emerged in 2008. Maria Ibarretxe, Izaskun Santamaría, Alaitz Arenzana, Jorge Lastra and David Aldai are the components of the collective. “We come from the world of film and collecting cinema and performing arts, we propose a trip to the public in our works,” says María Ibarretxe. They work together in five assemblies, including Apuntes, where the tendency to film is quite evident. “In the scene there are several planes, and the viewer chooses where to look, as if they were doing with the camera,” he continued. The people of Ruemania want the public to be the protagonist of the stories they tell: “After all, our work is based on communication and if you don’t have whom to steer, the work doesn’t make sense.”

Matxalen de Pedro (Horman Poster) matches Maria Ibarretxe. “Contrary to what is believed, the spectator is never a passive element. This relationship between the scene and the audience is going to be more or less close depending on the show. Between the two extremes there are many options, but the attitude of the public is always important,” said Matxalen de Pedro. The scene can be the fourth wall of the black box, and the dancers want to destroy it. “In the Perfect Past, for example, there is no fourth wall, the lights are on and we can see the faces and reactions of the public.” In the new work of Horman Poster, Sympathic Magic, Matxalen de Pedro, Igor de Quadra and Mbaye Sene immerse themselves in the mime or figure of the pierrot. As De Pedro explains, “mimesis opens up many pathways, and we wanted one of them to be linked to survival. We wanted to deepen the acculturalization suffered by the immigrant upon arriving here and for this we have come to the dancer Mbaye, who gives classes of African dance in Muelle 3”. Tests have begun these days.

The third member of this communication working group is Olatz de Andrés. We liked the work done by Privolva Landing, who was awarded the first prize of the Choreographic Competition in Madrid. Invited by the Malandain Ballet in Biarritz, they also had the opportunity to participate in the dance festival in Grenoble (France). The work being carried out in the dance company of Olatz de Andrés is entitled Medusa Begirada. “The three dancers will work on Medusa’s ability to stop the movement through the gaze, as well as the ability to update the myths,” explains De Andrés. He has explained to us his intention to release it at this year’s BAD festival.

Need for new forms of management

How can the work of companies be managed? Where to go? Is it a road to go solo? How to reach programmers and public spaces? How do you do that?

To seek answers to these questions, they have placed David Aldai as head of Communication and Distribution of the Foral Council. According to Matxalen de Pedro, “the creator cannot do the distribution and communication, because he suffices with his own. That’s why we wanted to take advantage of a figure like this.”

The dancer Olatz de Andrés tells us about her experience. “Participating in festivals and contests itself is not very far-reaching, as far as dance work is concerned, but it facilitates access to circuits and networks of halls. It is necessary to share spaces because the union between creators and programmers is difficult, it is not common”.

Maria Ibarretxe de Ruemania thus sums up this complex relationship: “Creators need a programmer and the programmer needs a creator. But many times the trench between the two is large. We need to bridge.”

Ibarretxe has been working in Belgium since 2007, in several dance companies around the world. In his view, the departure of the companies from here to the outside is as difficult as that from there. “I have been working abroad for seven years and have only been programmed once in Bilbao. It is clear that Belgium is today the capital of the performing arts and that we work in a peripheral state, at least if we are talking about performing arts.”

These dancers believe that the public must be educated and that “this work can be done by the company itself”. Therefore, the three companies that we brought to Leilcot want to act as a bridge, in a close context, but also to go abroad. It's not about doing traditional delivery work, it's about inventing new ways to publish it, so they decided to do communication work based on working together, looking not only at oneself, but also at the other, so as not to be alone and move forward together. “We want to open the doors to the three collectives and it seems to us that the way is to invent new programming formulas.”