Gran Bolero

My work combines mathematical structures with sensorial intensity. I like to compose formal architectures of the body that allow emotion to burst. I love to explore small variations and details inside repetition, to look at the rhythmic possibilities of simple actions.

Jesús Rubio Gamo

I’ve written only one masterpiece – Boléro. Unfortunately, there’s no music in it.

Joseph Maurice Ravel

It was 2009, I had just come back to my city, Madrid, after a few years in London. I was sad. I felt I was about to loose something that had been of vital importance for me: my love for dance. And we had the economic crisis especially in the Mediterranean countries. We couldn't get jobs. The banks were saved with the money of our taxes and we saw all those evictions, people being taken away from their houses.

A few years passed and I remember trying to keep dancing or making dances but it never made sense. I was about to give up. In 2011 we had a huge demonstration in Madrid. It was the Indignados Movement. People took the streets, slept in the squares, to say 'enough'. We wanted a regeneration, a rebirth, we wanted to stop a system that was corrupt. Those were days full of hope for change.

Ravel's "Boléro" appeared around that moment, in a rehearsal. It was like an impulse, like a train going forward, full of energy. It made me a kind of promise: if you take me you will get somewhere new. I took it.

Jesus Rubio Gamo

What we witnessed was the poetry of theatre; an exceptional physical discipline of twelve dancers, repetitive memory channeling ideas through bodies, while managing to follow the hypnotic energy of choreography, drawing on the binding structure of the musical score. What we witnessed was collective work, in the finest sense of the word. Where a mutual and key interdependency of dancers bridged their honest, bare presence, devoid of all theatrical clutter.   

Iztok Kovač

Gran Bolero, with twelve ecstatic dancers, at a time when, due to the pandemic, the rare performances we had the chance to see had featured only a few dancers, filled me with the hope and the desire to persevere; in life and in dance.

Petra Glad Mažar

The ritual of transformation of the human, dancing community lasts about fifty minutes, in a precise, meticulous gradation, a spiral repetition of patterns, with the chemistry of the body, partnership, intimacy seeping, leading slowly, spontaneously to a bursting, peeling of layers, shedding of tight clothes from strained body membranes, surrendering to the ecstatic pleasure of a community of equal sweaty bodies, burning out.

Maja Đurinović, Plesna scena

Gran Bolero is a performance that does not fully engage the audience with its own story and message, but expects its own response. Since it offers time and space to feel it and make sense of it, and puts the dancers in a position to relive their feelings, it is likely to disappoint those who demand a more concrete form of content - which is, after all, quite illusory given the musical character of Ravel's Bolero, which is already rather monotonous or even boring in the outset for some. But Jesús Rubio Gamo has, together with the dancers, enriched and conjured up the illusion of dance as a timeless window into the world of human interiority and their feelings, their loneliness and their desire to coexist. And thus confirmed another of his own statements: 'Dance gives hope to the body. Music transforms time into something better.

Damijan Vinter, Večer

The twelve dancers in Gran Bolero demonstrate not only the incredible physical discipline that this demanding work requires of the performers, but also the almost metaphysical coexistence of twelve bodies, which at every moment function as a single dancing organism. This is one of the key strengths of the piece, which was named the best Spanish dance production of 2020, among others. Jesús Rubio Gamo has managed to orchestrate the totality of the bodies - their physical characteristics, psychological nature, interrelationships and electrical tension. Even if the choreographic gesture rarely demands from the performers a perfect movement uniformity, the sense of uniformity of the siège is omnipresent. The closer we get to the conclusion, the more human refinement merges with animal authenticity and - to paraphrase Iztok Kovač - at the end of this poetry of theatre, all that remains is a sincere, naked presence, stripped of all theatrical clutter, and the audience's final conclusion - Gran Bolero is truly great.

Matic Ferlan for Odrisca