Guest post by Helena Thevenot

The depth of his work brings the audience closer to another kind of nudity; the nudity of the soul, which is far more difficult to undress. — Critic Roger Salas of dancer Damián Muñoz in El País

This weekend in Miami, Damián Muñoz joined fellow choreographer and dancer Jordi Cortés to bare his soul. No flesh is revealed in the award-winning dance-theater piece, Ölelés (2003), yet the duo from Barcelona explored the nexus between friendship and hatred in a gripping, intimate dialogue that could only be described as naked.

Presented by Tigertail and the Centro Cultural Español de Miami, Ölelés is based on the 1942 novel, Embers, by Austrian-Hungarian Sándor Márai about the reunion of two estranged friends, taking as a title a Hungarian word that can mean either to embrace or to kill. Fittingly, Muñoz and Cortés tested each other and their limits by pushing and pulling, holding, pressing, hanging, stepping on or over one another. Watching them, I tasted the bitterness, the desperate loneliness, and the vulnerability of making an emotional connection. When the rest of audience gasped, I knew I was not alone.

By the end, the two men sat near each other on a floor strewn with broken glass and flower petals. The music stopped abruptly as the upstage lights came up, blinding the audience long enough to make the dancers disappear. Silence fell like a dark curtain. As I left, it was not the amazing lifts or the spectacular turns while suspended from a wire that impressed me. Nor was it Javier Ulla’s fluid lighting or Maria Muñoz’s cinematic soundscape. Instead, I was left feeling still, as though I had surrendered to an embrace.