"When I was..." the new work of Eva Yerbabuena that closes the contest dedicated to the Flamenco and Spanish dance. XV Jerez Festival

Eva Yerbabuena

Until where can we imagine something we didn't lived". This is the deep thought that inagurates the new job of the granadine dancer Eva Yerbabuena, who comes back with her company after performing two years ago at the Villamarta theater her previous work, "Lluvia". In this occasion, the artist born in Frankfurt will be in charge to close the XV Jerez festival with "When I was...", a show that would be possible to see tomorrow ,saturday the 12th of March in the "Coliseo Jerezano".

In this show, the memories, real and fictitious ones, are again the "leit motiv"of a play
in which the symbolisim of a potter's wheel focus a scene, where Yerbabuena shows up ready to mold those sleepy conciences starting from her reputation of"melancolic woman".
The last day of the "muestra jerezana"of flamenco and spanish dance is completed with the session , from noon, of the workshop, "Understand the flamenco".Learn to distinguish the "palos", taught by Faustino Núñez in the Andaluz Center of Flamenco (CAF); and with a new exhibition from 7pm in the Sala Paúl, of the workshop of choreography of the valencian "maestro"Javier Latorre. In "When I was...", Eva Yerbabuena gets back that melancolic and nostalgic air that characterizes her, under the influence of the victims's relatives loss, in the Spanish Civil War, to think again about the absences, the movement and the search.
"I am a person always searching through movement, I can talk more with movement than with words. "What happened?, why this happened?, What would have happened if everthing would have been different?", thinks Yerbabuena in the short sypnosis of a play that locks up, as in other creations, more questions than answers.

For this work, the Granadine dancer and choreographer has come back with her habitual team, with the guitarist Paco Jarana. From his notes start the score of the show, with the scenic management of Juan Ruesga.
In "the Alfarero worshop", one of the most important scenes of this production, and with the mud as guide of the plot, that' s where the director admits that Eva "spreads all her mystery", in a conceived play,he explains, "like a circle structure, where the dancer and the lump of mud spinning form an important visual parallelism".

Yerbabuena imprime en el espectáculo su personal visión de la Guerra Civil

'Cuando yo era…'obra de Eva Yerbabuen

lThrough eight choreographic numbers, Yerbabuena gives to the show her personal vision of the Civil War in connection with her closest feelings and the self-improvement of the loss of the beloved in confrontation with a new life. In this stage we will be able to see a lump of mud spinning in a lathe, that would turn to allow the hand to mold the image, the image that will spin and will move , with the rythm of "serranas", "tangos", "fandangos", "bulerías"... In one word, between "palos" where one can get lost", said the dancer in front of the media.

Like she explained in the press media, her last work "is not easy" and she uses two languages. One, her dance, the other one is brought by the mud, one element that "builds and destroys". "We model the mud but with time it molds us", she added.
And the time and mud go together in "When I was...", when Yerbabuena as a child was a "silent witness" of adult conversations about hard events that happened in her family during the Civil War. From her great-grandmother Rosario, she listened the loss of her husband, and from her grandfather the war humoristic Gila's events, while he was showing his two shots in the leg.

"It was like a tale. It was after that I realized it was a tragedy, that's why the show was born", said the dancer.
And, she pays a tribute to her ancestors: her great grand-parents from her mother'side, and her grand-parents from her father'side,
victims of this disgrace.

She recognized that "there are people that don't need to look back", but she assured that "for me, forgetfulness doesn't exist" because it's essential for the transfert of the experiences and the knowledge from generation to generation. To Eva Yerbabuena
loneliness doesn't scare her, because "it's necessary, it forms part of our lives". This feeling is constant in all her shows, but in this one "with more intensity".