La Bella Otero closes the 2023 Danza Oviedo Festival at Teatro Campoamor

La Bella Otero arrives at Teatro Campoamor as part of the 2023 Danza Oviedo Festival. Following its appearance last week at the Granada Festival, La Bella Otero comes to Oviedo with Patricia Guerrero as guest artist and the special collaboration of Maribel Gallardo. This will be the final tour of La Bella Otero in the 2022–2023 season.

La Bella Otero can be considered an “operatic ballet” in the broadest sense of the term. It is a large-scale production, both because of the number of dancers and the deployment of costumes, which rigorously recreates the world of the Parisian Belle Époque, and because of the dramaturgical development of the story.

Rubén Olmo has placed dance at the service of storytelling in order to achieve a fusion of styles — from folklore to flamenco and stylized dance — to tell, through dance, the story of a woman who reinvented herself after a tragic event in her childhood, triumphed as an artist and courtesan, and ended up ruined by gambling.

The plot, dramatized by Gregor Acuña-Pohl, has selected some of the most significant moments in the artist’s biography that could be expressed through dance, without attempting to be exhaustive. “I have tried to stay close to the historical figure and turn it into a ballet that moves the audience, without judging her. The most important thing for me was to show a person with great magnetism, charisma and strength.”

Patricia Guerrero once again appears as guest artist on this tour, embodying the character of Carolina Otero. Patricia Guerrero has said of the role: “I am portraying a great woman, many things about whom I admire, and I very much enjoy having the opportunity to perform her.” She recognises that “she was a woman with great character, great self-confidence and a tremendous survival instinct. She enhanced her charisma and sensuality like no one else in order to achieve success.” The young dancer and choreographer trained in the companies of Mario Maya and Rubén Olmo. She is currently a leading figure in avant-garde flamenco and received the National Dance Award for Performance in 2021.

To embody the protagonist in her later years, Rubén Olmo is once again counting on the special collaboration of Maribel Gallardo, répétiteur of the Ballet Nacional de España. “Taking up the character of Madame Otero again, beyond what it means to step into the shoes of such a fascinating woman despite her tragic life, means reliving the emotion of feeling the stage and the warmth of the audience. Unfortunately, the artistic life of a dancer is very short, and only rarely does life give you an opportunity like the one I am fortunately experiencing, intensely and gratefully,” says the Cádiz-born dancer.

Musically, this new tour of La Bella Otero in Oviedo will feature the participation of Oviedo Filarmonía, conducted by composer and conductor Manuel Busto, who has coordinated the musicians from different styles who composed the music for this ballet, integrating them into the symphonic score he created.

The remaining compositions in the work were created by Alejandro Cruz Benavides, Agustín Diassera, the group Rarefolk, and flamenco guitarists Diego Losada, Víctor Márquez, Enrique Bermúdez and Pau Vallet.

Alongside the creation of such a complex and varied score, another of the challenges of this dramatic ballet has been the design of the nearly 200 costumes needed to dress the dancers in such diverse periods and settings as a Galician village, Belle Époque Paris, or a café cantante. Canary Islands designer Yaiza Pinillos is especially proud of her personal reworking of the Byzantine-inspired, jewel-embroidered costume that La Bella Otero wears in one of her most iconic portraits. In addition to the difficulty of designing costumes that reflect a period while allowing the dancers to move and change easily between scenes, there is also the use of wigs, beards, moustaches and hats required to characterize the characters.

For set designer Eduardo Moreno, the challenge was to design a single architectural element that would help identify the time and place of each scene with only a few simple additions. The lighting designed by Juan Gómez-Cornejo, for its part, envelops the dancers, adding an emotional element to each setting.

Since its premiere at Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela in 2021, La Bella Otero has also toured to Seville, Albacete, Málaga, Lorca, Bogotá and Granada.

Program:

LA BELLA OTERO

Danza Oviedo Festival 2023
Teatro Campoamor

June 30^th, 2023, 8:00 p.m.

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