Investigation
The body as legacy: memory, transmission and continuity
After many years of journeying, researching, and experiencing, I have become fully aware of the depth and immediacy of the legacy that resides within my own body. A legacy that is not only technical, but also historical, political, human, and profoundly sensitive. A legacy born in European modern dance, traversing war, exile, and migration, and arriving in the Americas to transform into a seed, resistance, and embodied knowledge. At the origins of this thinking are fundamental figures of modern dance such as Rudolf Laban , Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss, and Sigurd Leeder, who conceived of movement not as an empty form, but as the living manifestation of the internal states of the human being, in relation to space, time, energy, and consciousness. Their work gave rise to an understanding of the body as an expressive, political, spiritual, and dramaturgical territory. Within this genealogy, Patricio Bunster—disciple and assistant of Sigurd Leeder—occupies a fundamental place in the transfer and consolidation of this knowledge in Latin America. His work was crucial in shaping generations of dancers, choreographers, and creators, as well as in establishing a profound and conscious understanding of the moving body. Along this path, my greatest mentor was Patricio Bunster, founder of the Espiral Dance School, where I received my training from the age of 14, including my advanced degree. There, I had the opportunity to learn alongside him and also to train with renowned teachers such as Yasna Vergara, Raymond Hilbert, Rodrigo Fernández, and Valentina Pavés, among others, who profoundly influenced my understanding of the body, movement, and performance.
Through that experience, I not only acquired technical tools, but also a vision of the body as a site of thought, awareness, resistance, and creation. Through this training, that lineage entered my practice, my research, and my way of understanding movement as a living architecture—a dramaturgy that does not depend on words, but on presence, intention, and the deep organization of being.
Today, with a full awareness of the dimension of this inheritance, a need arises within me to give continuity to it, to expand it, and to share this knowledge. Not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as an act of responsibility and love toward a way of understanding the body that I consider one of the most lucid, complex, and sensitive to have developed within the field of movement-based arts.
This space—my work, my workshops, my research—is a form of recovery and projection. An attempt to make visible a line of thought that arrived on my continent due to painful historical circumstances—war, persecution, exile—and that nevertheless took root as one of the most profound visions of human functioning and its expression through movement.
Here, the body is not merely an instrument.
It is memory, a living archive, language, dramaturgical architecture, and consciousness in action.
THE BODY AS DRAMATURGICAL ARCHITECTURE
This workshop proposes an approach to understanding the body as language, structure, and thinking in action. It is aimed at:
• Directors
• Choreographers
• Playwrights
• Movement teachers
• Performing arts researchers
By engaging with the Laban/Leeder Method, participants gain greater clarity in directing, composing, and analyzing movement. The body ceases to be an ambiguous or purely intuitive territory and becomes a legible and repeatable system—one that can be observed, named, and transformed.
