“I was a late bloomer, but since I was a little girl I always knew I was going to be a ballerina. It was after seeing Maurice Béjart’s ballet at the Palacio de Deportes in Madrid, when I was 17 years old, that it became very clear to me. I remember I was taking the Selectividad exam, because I was going to study philosophy, and I went directly to the Ballet Nacional de España to ask what I could do. Carmen Roche saw me and told me that I had a lot of talent, but no idea. And that’s how I started to get into dance.”

Sol León

This Thursday in Dance and Diaspora. Spanish creators around the world , we have a meeting with Sol Léon. Cordovan by birth and universal by adoption, she has spent an important part of her creative life at the Nederlands Dans Theater, where she danced in masterpieces by Jirí Kylian, Van Manen, Mats Ek and Ohad Naharin, among others.

She is considered a late dancer. Perhaps this, added to her ability to “bite life and not let go”, has made her evolve as a syncretic creative dancer capable like few others of making movement and her body a paradigm of permanent choreographic reflection.  Her choreographic work began when she was twenty years old and only in 2002 she was appointed, together with Paul Lightfoot, resident choreographer of the NDT, a position in which they remained until 2020.

Jiri Kylian is for her a teacher and a model, not because he helped her on a creative level, but because he let her “fly alone, as birds do with their babies”.

She considers herself a Spanish creator and defends the telluric roots in the sap of her dance style. She vindicates the talent of dance in Spain, but is not satisfied with the cultural policies that the country develops with respect to dance.

Joris-Jan Bos Photography©