On returning from her international tours with companies whose practice is based on improvisation, through which she got to know first-hand the farm of Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson in Vermont (USA), Idoia created La puta inocencia (2002) and El rato de José (2002). In both pieces she collaborated horizontally with other artists and dancers, and her success opened up a slot for her among the Basque choreographers of the early 2000s. One of the invitations to stage this figure, that of the Basque choreographer presenting a piece in the Guggenheim Hall, was the origin of the second Fissure, Txoriak (2007). Txoriak is the second in a series of pieces with common features that Idoia groups under the title Fissures. All of them deal with frontality as a coercive element. Facing, going head-on, implies a distance towards the other. I am here and you are there, between us, a distance opens up. Although our foreheads lean against each other in mourning, what defines us continues to be that in-between, that emptiness that both organises and separates us. Fissures can be considered a study in progress of this split, of frontality as a structuring element in dance, but also in social and political choreography (the demonstrations and marches she grew up with in her native Gasteiz), as well as in interpersonal relationships or in the political and activist slogans that construct identity by confronting what we are not in order to define what we are. The Fissures are perhaps a study of how performativity in these different spheres, in family relations, in social and political struggles, in dance and also in gender are similar if we pay attention to frontality as a staging device. We march in crowds with a banner on the road in front of the oppressive state, we leave to confront what is expected of us at home, we show what we are capable of in front of a jury, an audience, on stage, we cut our hair and dress up to take the streets. In the Fissures, Idoia tries to open cracks in this structuring element, she strives to crack this given frontality, often by stressing the violent qualities that they impose as positions. We find in the Fissures a certain fondness for walls, surfaces, screens and walls as a trope. There is a continuous formal relationship between frontality and violence; in a way, the Fissures can be read as an attack on the arbitrary paradigm of frontality and its reductive character, producing an uninhabitable split. The frontal in Idoia’s Fissures flattens, crushes even, it is a conflictive heritage. Holes are opened in walls (Fisura nº4: per fora, 2012), and books are perforated (Fisura nª5: zuloak / neska eta mutila, 2013), the images of an action are superimposed on the action itself carried out live. In other cases, such as Fisura nª2: txoriak, the body is forced into a silhouette, into a series of flat, rigid figures for which movement is a pure transition between one hardened state and another. Idoia pierces encyclopaedias or paints a Martian on her breasts, waving her pelvis to distort the rigidity of the line (Fisura nº1, 2007). After all, t-shirts wear out, hair grows wild, and when you dig, you get mud under your nails, Idoia seems to be telling us. Water always finds a crack through which to escape, and laughter, as Bergson says, is an inarticulate sound that sprouts in search of an echo. When we witness the Fissures we clearly perceive that incorporating them hurts. Frontality and hardening injure bodies, whether our own or the social body, and this pain finds expression in the delirious gesture that inhabits these solos. The Fissures involve a certain hieratism. They harden the bodies, both of the one who performs them and of the one who contemplates them, and the resulting documents acquire an unsettling character. And if I am unsettling, it is because I am moving inside. Something dances inside me. The references to the material bases that gave shape to the Basque political conflict are clear in this series and their social correlates, such as drug consumption, slip in through figurative winks in Idoia’s works (Fisura nº6: zaldiak, 2016). Our bodies are altered. The same happens with the duality they entail. Idoia overcomes the contradiction in which she is immersed with a galloping howl. I perceive in them a certain animality opening up that can be revealed to us as abject, sexual or pathetic. We lack words.
