Rosa Romero lands at TNT with a personal, plastic and hilarious solo performance that loops through Andalusian cultural tradition to achieve very deep kind of intimacy.

Soy un baile is all about the difficulty of identifying with one’s own body. As Rosa says, the body has always been experienced as something foreign. That was until she recently discovered that the word “dissociation” could be used to understand that strangeness, for as a child all she knew was that she always saw herself from the outside, except when she danced. Through this experience, Rosa has nurtured the fantasy of existing in a parallel reality where the body doesn’t play the lead role, but can be an object, a memory, a phrase or a rhythm.

Transcending the body to become something else is the mystic ambition that Rosa Romero demonstrates can also be extremely earthly and sensitive. Beneath the exuberant surface of comedy and absurdity, the piece harbours illuminating paradoxes. How, in its attempt to become invisible, the body ends up being even more present. How, in conflict with one’s own body, one suddenly has to deal with the vulnerability of other bodies. How oppressive structures are also structuring and how their disappearance leaves us lacking something.

The theme of grief, which arises in so many of the pieces at this TNT, like Analphabet, Mourn baby mourn and Platea, resurfaces here through otherness or absence, evoked by a sampler that Rosa uses on stage to try to hold an impossible conversation. In the background, the ghost of everything we were unable to say and the transgenerational repetition of fears, repressions and yearnings for freedom. And, just like in Gaya de Medeiros’ Pai para jantar, corporal dysphoria is merely the starting point for exploring the ambivalent relationships that we can feel with our culture, our society and our parents.