Title: At Last
Creation: Eduardo Zúñiga
Performers: Jessica Martín, Diana Huerta
The sheets of bright metallic foil variously rippling, flapping and wrapping through Eduardo Zúñiga’s duet At Last are only the most obvious of the work’s many enigmas. In the beginning, Jessica Martín bursts from a foil cocoon like a creature breaking out from an egg. Wearing big y-fronts and a little top, she develops a fierce, strangely combative relationship with a diagonal corridor of light.
Suddenly, another woman – Diana Huerta, also in y-fronts, but topless – bursts into the corridor from offstage. She too is fierce, and strangely combative. The women tussle and tug, embrace and push away, bodies forceful, feet firmly planted. Martín runs laps around the stage, a length of foil held aloft like a flag while Huertas hunches and scowls, then hooks her own foil over Martín’s head as if snaring an animal in a net. A pummelling musical beat drives up the tension.
Where does it all lead? To the sound of Etta James singing ‘At Last’; to Martín riding Huertas’ shoulders, to feet scrunching foil; to the pair of them stretching a metallic sheet, its corners clenched in their mouths.
Like several pieces on this first evening at Certamen Coreográfico, Zúñiga’s feels more connected to its performers than its audience, its choreography more like the traces of ideas than the embodiment of their communication.
Sanjoy Roy.