Gran Teatre del Liceu: NumEros — Compañía Nacional de Danza

About the Event

Nestled in the heart of Barcelona, the illustrious Gran Teatre del Liceu is set to host an exquisite performance that promises to enchant dance enthusiasts and art aficionados alike.

The Compañía Nacional de Danza returns to the stage of the Gran Teatre del Liceu to present a triple bill: NumEros. A privileged opportunity to experience three choreographic works by three absolute masters of 20th‐century choreography: George Balanchine, who redefined 20th‐century ballet and turned it into a moving architecture in which music becomes space and the body, pure structure William Forsythe, who deconstructed the classical language to its limits and transformed it into a field of research on the body, geometry, and contemporary thought, and, finally, Jacopo Godani, who has taken this legacy to an extreme physical and visual intensity, in which mathematical precision coexists with a visceral and radically contemporary energy.
NumEros is a title born from the creative friction between two seemingly opposing, yet deeply complementary, concepts: numen and eros. Eros is the embodied vital impulse, the desiring force that traverses the body and sets it in motion it is creative energy, physical drive, excess, and necessity. Numen, on the other hand, refers to that which is intangible: the invisible presence, poetic inspiration, an immanent spirituality that transcends the performer's will and guides the gesture beyond conscious control. When these two poles meet, NumEros emerges, a notion that also evokes number as a principle of order, as a hidden pattern that structures movement and gives it form. The program thus proposes an articulation between desire, inspiration, and structure, three essential dimensions of the creative experience in dance.

From this concept, the program brings together works by three creators who have developed a rigorous, formal choreographic thought deeply linked to numerical structures. In their pieces, choreography is constructed as a field of tensions between the rational and the corporeal, between what can be measured and what remains irreducible. Proportions, repetitions, permutations, and sequences do not function as simple compositional schemes, but as territories experienced from the body. The body does not execute forms, but rather embodies them, alters them, and puts them in crisis. Dance thus becomes a process in which mathematical precision meets the excess of desire and formal abstraction meets the affective power of gesture.
NumEros is part of a choreographic tradition in which the body is thought in motion. The result is an experience in which the number does not limit the body, but rather makes it vibrate.