In 2019 the body of the Argentine dancer and choreographer Marina Otero (Buenos Aires, 1984) broke.
The diagnosis: a herniated disc.
Her pain paralyzed her.
She had to undergo several operations.
She was limping.
She couldn't dance.
Her injury made her aware of the vulnerability of her body and forced her to give up her stage role.
The following year, five dancers interpreted what she could no longer do in
Fuck Me
, a powerful biodramatic project that was interrupted by the pandemic in Argentina, but, on the other hand, has opened the doors of Europe for her — it has just premiered at the Festival de Autumn of Madrid.
Until that moment, she Otero had not been too aware of the loss of youth or the limits of her body.
Obsessive and methodical, she trained daily.
She demanded more, more.
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"How not to overdo it when you know it's the last time you're going to do something."
It was 2012, it was the first work by Marina Otero,
Andrea
, but in that reflection thrown from the stage to the public one could already see one of the pillars on which this choreographer who has become one of the benchmarks of the new generation of the Argentine art scene abroad builds her creative universe.
She danced in that one-person work with airless vertebrae.
She cried.
She hit herself.
She was breaking.
She was perverted.
She was embarrassed.
Her body was there an object of work shared by the dancer and the prostitute she represented.
An over-demanded body, pushed to the limit, this time by her own decision and not by that of a director who directed her before and after, such as Pablo Rotemberg, whom Otero approached because she saw herself so reflected in him that she considered him a soul. twin.
“She gives everything on stage, with great intelligence and a formidable technical background”, says Rotemberg.
The director assures that she is a “unique and unforgettable” performer for everything she generates in you when you see her.
There are viewers who get angry.
Others are horrified.
Others thank.
"You may or may not like her, but there is no way that she will leave you indifferent," says an Argentine theater critic.
Otero says that dance has been present in her life since she was a child.
“Since my mother danced, she would take me to see dance classes.
At school, at family gatherings, she was always choreographing my cousins, my friends… ”.
At first she thought of being an anthropologist and she started that career, but she abandoned it.
She later studied at the National University of the Arts (UNA), but she did not finish her studies either.
She then began to train with different teachers and teachers and in a self-taught way.
He made the leap from acting to directing in 2012. Argentina was entering a period of economic stagnation that would lead to a new crisis, and nobody called Otero to dance.
He decided to put together "something alone, out of necessity."
Andrea was the seed of an artistic process that has her body and her life as research objects;
a work in permanent construction where reality and fiction merge in an embrace that makes them indistinguishable.
From that idea was born
Remember 30 Years to Live 65 Minutes
(2015), in which her moving body dialogued with home videos, photos, songs, lived stories and other fictionalized ones.
A music video with the song Nothing is forever, by Fabiana Cantilo, closed that work.
That first biodramatic project gave Otero a voice of her own as a director.
Her national consecration came with
200 blows of serrano ham
(2018), starring the television actor Gustavo Garzón.
“I realized that I was a man without a body.
Pure mind.
Pure word.
An actor without a body.
And I said to myself: 'I want to do something from the body'.
I want to dance, I want to sing and I want to say whatever my asshole sings.
I want to make a work that arises from this need, from this emotional tear that I feel.
Where I don't care about the money or the cartel,” Garzón said after putting himself in Otero's hands.
She guided Garzón to reappropriate his body;
in
fuck me
guide the dancers to express themselves in place.
They exhibit the power of their dance, the nakedness of their bodies, the fragility due to the passage of time and the vulnerability that submitting implies.
“I always felt it and saw it backwards, with my own body and the body of all women.
Unfortunately we were, are and will be reified;
opinions are and will be expressed about our bodies.
Men are more deprived of that and that revenge gives me pleasure, that justice is done for an hour, giving the possibility of imagining that it is the other way around”, says the director about the impact generated by seeing five men dance naked on stage .
His latest opus,
Love Me
(2022) —scheduled tonight at the Fall Festival— is a continuation of
Fuck Me
.
“First
catch
me [fuck me], then let's talk about love.
Sex is body.
Love is not so much body as time.
Or maybe love is a body holding time when novelty is left aside.
Staying, patience”.
The work, created with the director Martín Flores Cárdenas, speaks of love, but also of violence, and is, in turn, a farewell to the place where she was born and grew up.
Since March, Otero has lived in Madrid, the city that is most similar to Buenos Aires.
Cárdenas describes her as a passionate performer and choreographer.
A sensitive machine.
Broken.
failed.
"Her creativity from her springs from those cuts, from those wounds," she says.
The same explosion that destroys it, in turn inspires and sets it free.
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