INNER VIEW: Tania Pérez-Salas
creates sensual modern dances

Tania Pérez-Salas was raised in a family in Mexico City in which culture and the life of the mind were important. So while studying dance was a passion in her youth, and acting and modeling were fun side pursuits, she formed a lifelong affection for books, paintings, music, and movies that finds itself into every dance she creates as an adult.

“Doing choreography brings everything I love together,” says Pérez-Salas, speaking by phone from Mexico City. “I can do whatever I want.”

Tania Pérez-Salas Compañía de Danza, a modern troupe directed by the choreographer-dancer, has become a hot commodity in the dance world with its sexually charged creations. The ensemble’s first State College appearance at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, January 29, in Eisenhower Auditorium features three dances—The Hours, Anabiosis, and the company’s signature work, Waters of Forgetfulness—inspired by the ideas of writers Michael Cunningham, Octavio Paz, and Ivan Illich.

“Her choreography is rooted in the clean line and attack of classical ballet, as is the dancing of her fine [twelve]-member troupe, based in Mexico City,” a New York Times critic wrote last year after seeing the same dances on the scheduled Penn State program. “But the dances stood out most for their intense theatricality and for Ms. Pérez-Salas’s evident delight in entertaining her audiences.

“There is also a filmic quality to all three pieces, which unfold in brief episodes on a dark stage. She has a vivid visual imagination comparable to that of [Russian choreographer] Boris Eifman, and seems also to have been influenced by the style of Cirque du Soleil. But there is an intimacy to her choreography that makes it very much her own.”

Pérez-Salas formed the company in 1994, when she was in her early 20s. The ensemble made its United States debut in 2005.

The Hours, inspired by the novel of the same name by Cunningham, draws on the life and work of Virginia Wolfe and is about three women united by their dissatisfaction but divided by decades. Black-and-white projections enhance the lush music and dance. Pérez-Salas is quick to point out that she choreographed her version of The Hours a year before the film adaptation of Cunningham’s novel was released.

“That piece for me it’s very, very feminine,” she says.

Pérez-Salas makes use of such innovative theatrical elements as three women sharing a massive ball gown and music ranging from Baroque composer Vivaldi to the polyphonic Gypsy-rock of Goran Bregone.

“I put lots of paintings inside the choreography…. [The three female dancers] are interconnected.  They’re like one put together into the other in a way that I talk about many things about women—what the feelings are of women inside through their lives, that they change a lot. When they initiate their sexual activity, when they have a child, when they have a strong relation[ship], when they get old. All these sensations I could read them through the Michael Cunningham book,” she says.

“I thought he was not a man, but he was a woman,” she confesses, “because really he would describe what a woman felt by seeing herself in the mirror when she was becoming older or when she was talking with a friend or when she was being a mother. And so it was very clear for me the different stages of women to our lives.”

Anabiosis is based on The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, a series of essays by Nobel Laureate Paz. From the observation that love is our only solace in an increasingly technocratic world, Pérez-Salas blends emotion and technique to attest that eroticism and love are two increasingly divergent stems with a mutual root. The dance, which features three couples set amid a chaotic world, is set to music by Hayden, J. S. Bach, modern electronic composers, and others. Anabiosis includes nudity.

“I had doubts love exits,” she says, “because the only thing I see is that people move because of sexual interests or other interests rather than love. And after reading the book and having a very, very strong process inside this question vividly in my life, I would say evidently love exists.”

The word anabiosis, she says, refers to someone who was dying but regains life.

“It’s a process of being very critical of our own way of visualizing love and eroticism and sexuality. It’s a very erotic and sensual piece,” she says. “Also, The Hours talks about the sensuality of women and the sensuality connected with men.”

Pérez-Salas says most of her dances nowadays include nudity. “I feel that the body is our best costume. I love nudity,” she says. “…I see the body as sculpture. I love Rodin. I love many, many other sculptures that show the body.…The body is our presentation. It has our soul. It has our spirit. It has our intellectual capacity.…So sometimes when I make nudity, I feel, you know, just putting a body that’s absolutely nude [in a dance] it’s so strong and so brilliant in a way, because it has so much light, the body, just by itself.” 

Waters of Forgetfulness is the choreographer’s aquatic vision based on a short novel published by revolutionary priest-philosopher Ivan Illich, in which the former Penn State visiting professor asserts that our notion of water has changed according to shifting ideas of the usefulness of the earth. Six dancers create a haunting movement and sound vocabulary in ankle-deep water before fine sheets of sand cascade them from above. The music of contemporary composers, including Arvo Pärt, propels the choreography.

“I got to know Ivan,” Pérez-Salas says, “and I was very impressed. And I’m very impressed by the people who are still part of this movement that he started. And reading essays of this person are incredibly interesting.”

Illich, a native of Austria, taught courses in Science, Technology, and Society as well as philosophy at Penn State in the 1980s and 1990s. From the 1980s until his death in 2002, Illich traveled widely, splitting his time mainly among the United States, Mexico, and Germany.

“I wanted to do a piece where the main character was not a man or a woman or a story but involved men and women in a way,” Pérez-Salas says. “The principal character was something abstract, and it was the water, and how men and women interact with the water and how important it is for our spiritual life.”

She has a medical condition that caused her to have trouble sleeping. “My therapy, actually, was going four hours a day in the water.…Being in the water for four hours a day made me think about water, and suddenly I said, well this is absolutely incredible. Water can transform.”

In her part of Mexico the climate is arid, she notes, so her only contact with water is usually either in a glass or a bath. “Having the contact of nature there, even though I lived in a city, was so important to me. So I made a piece where I think people feel connected to nature, and to love, and to their own humanity at the same time.” 

Artistic Viewpoints, an informal discussion featuring Pérez-Salas, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders. Artistic Viewpoints regularly fills to capacity. Seating is available on a first-arrival basis.