Nau 2, a stripped-down, high-rise industrial building, is the space that houses the work of the La Corcoles company. A cable suspended 3 meters high and a balance beam is all the tightrope walker needs to prepare and rehearse her shows. Mariona Moya, the performer of the company, entered El Canal with the co-production Carena at the end of 2022. Since then, the artist and the rest of the members of the company have been working on this piece with a surprise: two shows ended up being born. Carena, not yet finished or premiered, and H, a second already finished piece that arose from a short number that the company had to wear to openings and other events, and which, as it went on stretching it to make it more long and adjust to the tempos that were asked of him, he ended up with a whole new piece. “In the end, the residence here at El Canal has served to give birth to two shows. Now I live spinning H while still creating Carena. They are two projects that stretch over time. It’s being long because for me it’s like a discovery also within the discipline”, explains Moya.
And when the company entered El Canal to work, they already sensed that the piece Carena would require much more time than expected: “We had to respect the time the piece needed, which was this year and a half more or less”, says Moya. They were able to have this time thanks to this residence in the center of Salt. It is a piece where the artist works hard all by herself: generating the material, creating a choreographic vocabulary and doing research. “It is being a really long process. It’s a 45-minute piece where I’m alone on stage, naked, without a curtain to hide. It’s laborious”, explains Moya.
Mariona Moya has been an artist specializing in tightrope balancing since 2009, the year the company La Corcoles was created. The artist started with a small structure, without a bar, two meters high. “Later I discovered tightrope walking and fell in love with it,” says the acrobat. This infatuation led her to work for other companies in Belgium and France, where she spent six years working and researching, performing and choreographing. Now, after a pandemic and a daughter, she is returning home. “I saw that it was time to take the company back in solo format and bring out this Carena that, in fact, I had been chasing for years”, explains Moya.
After fifteen years of journey and relationship with the cable, the artist now looks back and sees how his relationship with it has changed. Self-demand, effort, wanting to be the best and believing that you are never enough marked his first years of learning the discipline. Moya was self-taught and started late, a fact that lived for a long time as a shortcoming. Now, however, he is in the final stretch and it is clear that the cable discipline will accompany him for only a few more years. From this new position, knowing that there is an end that is approaching, the artist sees it very differently: “Making this reflection has freed me from all this self-demand and has pushed me to say ‘now I will do what I feel like doing, what I feel I want to do, what I have inside, and I’ll let it go and let whatever happens happen‘”, explains Moya. Over time, the artist’s relationship with the cable has ceased to be conflictual and has become easier and smoother. However, the years pass, and physically it hurts more and costs him more than years ago. “Before, I spent hours and hours and days and days training and now it’s different. But I’m also more decisive”, says the artist. Despite everything, she is still very much in love with the discipline.
Both Carena and H are high-wire shows and use the same structure with few variations in height and length. But they are two completely different stories. So, with such a specific discipline and structure, how do you tell two different stories, without text and only with the body? This has been the company’s main challenge, explains the artist, but they believe they have succeeded.
H is set up as a very fresh, easy show for all audiences. It is the “tangerine sorbet”, in the words of the artist. The show, awarded as Best Street Circus Show 2023 at the Zirkolika awards in Catalonia, revolves around the relationship between her tool, the see-saw, and herself: “It’s where I’ve been trapped for these 6 years, in to discover what I had in my hands and what happened to me when I touched it, when I destabilized it, when I leaned on it”, explains Moya. In the end, she realized that the piece was not a solo but a duet between her and the object, without which the artist could not be on the wire. It is a waltz between the two, both physical and emotional: “Its weight reminds me of my daughter when she was born and that gives me a quality of movement and an emotion that takes me somewhere”, explains the acrobat. The piece draws heavily, therefore, from a personal experience of the artist.
In Carena, on the other hand, she is more at the center. In this show there are not one, but three sticks, each with different qualities. ‘Carena’ is the apex where height, vertigo and fear appear. It is a very fragile section and this is where the artist positions himself: “I am talking about a fight with myself. The idea is to try to see the fear that appears in me, the risk, the vertigo, the fragility. And from here how I deal with it and how I work on it”. In this piece, the company is helped by other elements such as a voice that comes out projected by a loudspeaker and that puts words to the protagonist’s internal and introspective thoughts.
In both pieces, however, the artist has had to work on how to convey the emotion based on the discipline of tightrope walking. And he found the answer in movement and symbols: “Through the body, through colors and suggestive images that can be quite clear. These elements intersect and draw an iconography and symbols in this scenic space”, explains the artist. This gives the piece multiple layers of reading: there will be those who will go further and perceive all this imagery and there will be those who will marvel at the practice of tightrope walking and acrobatics, a discipline that captivates very easily.
