Inventing and managing

Olga Mesa

From 2009 to 2012

Since 2009, Off Limits is working closely with the company of the choreographer and dancer Olga Mesa and has coproduced – along with the Reina Sofía Museum and FRAC Alsace-, her most recent work labOratorio labOfilm (2009).

Off Limits has been nationally and internationally responsible of the production, documentation, content creation, dissemination, promotion and design and implementation of the conventional communication campaign and social media.

Olga Mesa is one of the most important figures of the new Spanish contemporary dance. She develops an experimental work halfway between dance, performance art and visuals arts. Choreographer and visual artist, she founded her company in 1992 in Madrid. Her work includes the video-creations Lugares intermedios (1993) and Europas (1995), which decisively introduce the presence of the camera in all her subsequent stage works. She makes the Project Más público, más privado (2001-2006), consisting of five movements, being the last one La danse et son double (2006). In 2001 she is invited by the Théâtre de la Ville in París to carry out the replacement of her solo estO NO es Mi Cuerpo (1996). In 2005 she is invited by the Théâtre Pôle Sud in Strasbourg as resident artist for two years and makes El cuerpo próximo (itinerant laboratory) and Le prochaine regard (documentary film). The same year, she founds the Hors Champ / Fuera de Campo Association, in France. Her creations have been featured in Spain, Portugal, France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, England, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil and the United States.

Her most recent work, labOratorio labOfilm (2009-2012), is inspired by the character of Snow White as it was interpreted by the Swiss writer Robert Walser and the Portuguese director Joao César Monteiro. Its representation is accompanied by the live embodiment of a film in which the camera becomes accomplice and extends the experience of space and the experimentation of the look. Camera and movement translate the body’s relationship to the world, reality and fiction, to the visible and invisible, to the individual and collective memory. Here, dance is not the mere writing of the body in space, but the performance of a body as operator.

labOratorio labOfilm is an unusual work that approaches the public the process of creation. Olga Mesa devises this work in 2007 during a residency as curator in Frac Lorraine (France), and began the creating process in Off Limits, with the first residency of the project. She made three other residences: in the Reina Sofía Museum, in the Citemor Festival (Portugal) and in FRAC Alsace (France). The world premiere took place in 2012 in Guimaraes, in the context of the cultural capital of that Portuguese city.

Photo: 'labOratorio labOfilm' © Susana Paiva