“When I left in 1976 I left because there were no places to dance in Spain. If there had been, I assure you I would have stayed”.

Nazareth Panadero

In this second rendez-vous  of Dance & Diaspora. Spanish creators around the world, Nazareth Panadero and María Pagés will talk about dance from the creative point of view but also about the profession, of which they both know so much because they have dedicated their whole lives to it.

If one had to look for a distinctive sign of this Spanish dancer, it is undoubtedly her immeasurable sincerity in life and on stage. In 2014, when she was awarded the National Prize, she commented to the journalist of the newspaper El Confidencial who interviewed her that “dance everywhere is an art that is always behind the others. And in Spain it is even more complicated because we have a certain historical backwardness that is difficult to recover”.

Trained in Madrid, Zaragoza and Paris, and after her time at the Ballet Theâtre Contemporain d’Angers and the Ballet de Poche, she moved in 1979 to Wuppertal to the Tanztheater Pina Bausch, where she developed her entire career.

With respect to joining the Tanztheater Pina Bausch, her creative abode, Nazareth Panadero recalls that “Pina invited a man and a woman to participate in her work, us, without knowing that we were a couple. The adventure was so exciting that we went for a year… And my fascination lasts to this day.”

Image:  Ulli Weiss