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A body remains inside an empty water reservoir — a drained water tank. Its walls contain the vacuum, resonating in a world scorched by heat and silence.“El Uc” is a choreographic and sound work conceived as a living composition for a single performer. It unfolds in eight scenes, each sustained by a precise compositional logic: temperature, collapse, invocation, return. Developed as a long-duration encounter, the piece places the body under environmental and acoustic pressure.

Uc refers to an ancestral Ibizan cry used throughout the centuries by farmers to communicate across valleys and mountains. It had no single meaning: it could serve to ask for help, announce an arrival, or perhaps invoke rain. Its tone — sharp, raw, sustained — carries urgency and ambiguity. Through an experiment based on movement and improvisation, the protagonist recalls fragments of a sonic memory that once served to call forth rain. The performer, Sofya Shaikut, confronts loss and the longing for connection — an innocence eroded by extractive modernity — in a passage where the body gradually abandons contemporary logic in order to access a deeper sensory system.

Gadea’s musical composition unfolds between analog synthesizers and local instruments, intertwining in a progressive thinning of musical texture. It is a stripping away of sound: as the layers sharpen and dissolve, listening shifts toward the surrounding space — its noises, its silences — inviting reflection on the symbiotic relationship between the mechanical and the organic, where absence resonates as strongly as presence.Traditional forms such as the Ball pagès, and Ibizan instruments — the espasí, the flute, castanets, and drum — appear only as traces. They are not embodied in fixed forms but deconstructed: integrated into the rhythm through a transformation of their usual function, disarticulating the structures that contain them.

The piece becomes a lament, an invocation, and a meditation on ecological memory. It highlights the urgency of restoring our relationship with the Earth. As it unfolds, it reveals the maternal force of nature and the spirit of renewal, until the moment when the rain returns — not as a miracle, but as recovery. (Text by Carlota Marques)

Duration: 41 min

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