Verbena Band

A “verbena” is both an open air dance orchestrated by the playing of a band, popular in the Spanish hot summer nights of Corpus Christi and village celebrations, and a powerful medicinal plant. A verbena activates a space for multiple encounters, like familiar, popular, generational or sensual. In this kind of festivity, the traditional and the folklore blurs with the modernity of neon strobe lights and the latest summer beats. Inspired by this type of gathering in celebration for movement, bringing different times, purposes and possibilities of encounter together, Hugo le Brigand and Veza Fernandez join forces with a composer to create their own “verbena band”. In this band body flesh, guttural sounds, microphones, electronic devices, dances and songs from past and future are equally instruments supporting, accompanying, moving each other, creating a unity of different sounding bodies. The feeling of band and of open air dance arises within the performance in the encounter and dialogue between three bodies: the voice, the sound and the flesh. These find togetherness by exploring live different forms of listening, like for example through touch, the materiality of the voice or the textures and intensities of a dance. Like in a musical band each member has their own status and language while sharing at the same time their languages to come together in multiple form(s), dealing with both resistances and separations as well as melting into each other. Partly set and partly improvised the aim of this performance is to create the feeling of a summer dance in all its magic, tradition, potentialities and movement to celebrate and think together about what coming together in music and dance can do. In these pandemic times where gathering is a continuous danger and where longing for getting close intensifies day by day a screaming for a performative cure invoked the verbena band to come into action, invoking proximity, movement, enjoyment and touch through their dialogue.