Compañía Nacional de Danza

#INCUBATIO Circumambulatio recovers an ancient practice, Incubatio, a technique aimed precisely at a process of re-association and reorganization of the psychological complexity of the human being in order to enable the development of a new center of the personality. A center that functions like a magnet on the processes of the unconscious that spiral around it. A center that is nothing but the point where the psyche merges with the body.

In this sense, #INCUBATIO Circumambulatio is a work based on the practice of the Incubatio, which originated in Western Asia, on the distant margins of the Eastern Greek world, and which spread and developed during the classical period throughout southern Europe, even reaching the Iberian Peninsula. It was a healing technique that involved lying down in a sacred space, a cave or temple, to enter a state beyond waking consciousness, until it ended with a vision or dream with healing capabilities. In these rituals, the sick or person initiating the practice was not alone; there were people in charge of the space called Iatromantis who accompanied the patient to understand what they needed to know without interfering with the experience. This technique was practiced in classical Greece by figures such as Parmenides or Pythagoras, who we have traditionally considered philosophers, but who were actually poets whose poems were magical texts. In those times, the poet was a magician, a shaman. The poet’s chant was simply a journey to another world, to another state of consciousness. And their journey was their chant and dance.

#INCUBATIO Circumambulatio is a creation by Muriel Romero and Pablo Palacio that explores in a scenic format this ancient ritual aimed at inducing dream episodes for healing purposes, a practice that lies at the foundation of Western culture and also forms the basis of modern psychotherapy.

#INCUBATIO Circumambulatio is a work that combines dance, electroacoustic music, and artificial intelligence models to delve into archetypical images associated with trance states with the support of cutting-edge interactive technology specially created for this work. The piece aims precisely to highlight the importance of connecting with a part of the human being that is increasingly forgotten, more collective, and expressed in a sea of images or forms that occasionally reach our consciousness through dreams or abnormal mental states. A state that speaks a kind of language that bridges the way we consciously express our thoughts with a more primitive, more colorful, more graphic form of expression: a dreamlike language that appeals directly to feeling, to emotion, and therefore to the body.

The piece proposes a new hashtag, #Incubatio, which paradoxically invites a certain disconnection from the digital media that usually envelop us and encourages connection with oneself through interactive technology specially designed to connect with our body and translate dance into sound, image, and light.

This piece uses creation technologies designed within the context of the European project PREMIERE, funded by the Horizon Europe program.