Mónica Calle’s pre-show explanation that Ensaio para uma cartografia is rooted in death does not make a lot of sense to me, yet the following two hours do. A group of women, who appear to be aged between twenty and seventy, venture into a resolutely somatic search for virtuosity, resilience, strength and beauty. 

Prerecorded audio from an archival rehearsal opens an invisible orchestra pit between the performers and the audience. A meticulous conductor’s male voice is mastering his orchestra in Ravel’s Bolero, while the dancers repeatedly pick up their synchronised choreography from the top. This exhaustive physical loop stretches through time, presence and absence, seen and heard in an ongoing striving towards an ever-elusive perfection of form. Even after the disappearance of the mysteroius voice, the Bolero’s rhythm will accompany us until the end, complemented at times by works by Stravinsky and Beethoven.

The anxiety that their nude bodies are being fetishised or reduced to sweat-covered statues in motion as ornaments in someone else’s vision is gradually released as they valiantly reclaim the performance. Their subsequent tries and fails to dance on pointe, or play classical music on cellos and violins, steadily brings them closer to the pit that was never there, and to us. The process of never quite arriving but trying again unfolds as the piece’s meta-text, which is intensively lived through. The strain on their faces and muscles accumulates intoxicating energy; no wonder the ovations were explosive.