Clara Tena, Sara Fontán
Clara Tena (Barcelona, 1983) is a dancer and choreographer specializing in contemporary dance and improvisation, trained between Catalonia and New York. Her artistic research focuses on the exploration of the moving body, positioned between the sophistication of instant choreography and the poetics of the everyday.
In 2008, she co-founded the multi-format project Feather Leather with Yurie Umamoto, which culminated in the solo Animal of the Month: Belier, presented at Festival Grec 2010 during her residency at La Caldera. She has collaborated as a performer with artists such as Alexis Eupierre, John Jasperse, Xavier Le Roy, Bea Fernández, Elena Albert, Aimar Pérez Galí, Mireia Saladrigues, Núria Guiu, and Quim Bigas, among others.
In parallel, she develops PIÑA, an audiovisual project combining music and dance in unusual spaces, in collaboration with Sara Fontán. Recently, she has worked on interdisciplinary projects such as SUSANA, an open-source board game designed to generate knowledge through conversation, and PIÑA PEDRA COLUMNA, a site-specific intervention and an ode to women's labor, co-created with the collectives PIÑA and PEDRA at Fabra i Coats and Keroxen.
Currently, she collaborates with Eulàlia Domènech on Les Poncelles, an arts incubator in nature located in Vidrà, where she resides. Her ten years of experience as a yoga teacher and in cultural management have allowed her to balance her artistic career with family life.
Sara Fontán (Vigo, 1980) is a violinist trained under Cuban maestro Armando Toledo and at the Birmingham Conservatory, where she received the award for best academic record. She has developed an eclectic career spanning from classical music to sound experimentation.
She is the co-founder of the videodance project PIÑA alongside Clara Tena and enjoys teaching at L'Escola d'Arts en Viu in El Prat. She is part of the directed improvisation collective Caballo Ganador and currently performs as one half of the duo Los Sara Fontán with Edi Pou. She has participated in various musical projects such as Big Ok, Pérez, Árbol, Manos de Topo, Joan Colomo, and Mishima.
In the realm of performance, she has co-directed the sound and music for EIXAM I RAUXA, a community performance conceived and performed by the residents of the Sant Andreu district, together with Pau Rodríguez. She has also collaborated with artists from other disciplines on projects such as Intervenció V: so+comunitat+actuació at Centre Negra with Gonzalo Borondo, Nil Gallego, and Victoria Macarte; O-Brim! Deformar el Senyal at Fundació Suñol with visual artist Anna Irina Russell; and PIÑA PEDRA COLUMNA at Fabra i Coats and Keroxen.
Casa Pena
After having collaborated in video format as PIÑA, we felt the need to create together again and dive into artistic research, taking advantage of this moment of maturity and exclamation. We believe in the altered state of consciousness as a possibility, a crack through which other dimensions, sensitivities, and gazes slip in.
Traumatic processes or injuries, and the persistence to do what we know how to do, understood as a new starting point, activate the desire to investigate the durability of grace and the possibility of continuing to create when your skills have mutated.
After the apocalyptic vision and the urge to delicately disappear from the earth, re-enchantment appears, opening a path where we not only try to survive but even to live with satisfaction. A path with many stations: leaving the cabin and interacting with others, recognizing the “aching” body and mind, rest, the workout apps that cure you in 20 minutes, chemistry, rites of passage, the desire to multiply, or the body/matter that neither generates nor desires virtuosity in dance, but instead wants to find itself by moving its own or others' realities.
We will delve into the revision of psychobiology, neuroscience, and neuroelectrical processes to extract knowledge and content that we will link to our sonic and physical practices. Given that these themes are historically prone to drama, romanticism, and sentimentality, we are interested in approaching this project from an autobiographical, absurd, and para-scientific perspective.
