Compañía Mercedes Ruíz

Mercedes Ruiz asks for your permission to dance. Or rather, she humbly demands your attention: she wants you to see her, to feel her dance. Mercedes has spent nearly all he r – short – life dancing on stage: ever since they enrolled her, with just seven years, as a “cabin boy” in the Company of Manuel Morao and Gitanos de Jerez to perform in New York. Fervent red blood cells of compás and wise platelets which know when and how to stop run through her veins: Mercedes breathes flamenco, she feels through flamenco. Feel: this is the verb she uses to transmit her experience during the long process of creation of a new show, or as a synthetic balance after each performance: she feels it or she doesn’t feel it, she felt the flamenco singer or not; she felt -herself- well or awful. In her feel fits a whole world: the one of a sensitive and hidden soul that has made dance its particular form of expression.
Perhaps it is for this -for this assumption of flamenco as her vital, spiritual language- that a few years ago Mercedes began an introspective journey, a journey of reflective self -awareness of her dance: a process that will help her to unite, in close and indissoluble communion, the te chnical development with the emotional and sentimental language. And although Déjame que te baile is a step further in this direction; it is, however, a different show from her previous two 'big' proposals: for if Perspectivas was a hymn to light and to life (after her maternity) and Ella a response to personal anxieties and black omens; Déjame que te baile focuses on the need Mercedes feels to reinterpret her dance, to once again conceive flamenco styles – in flamenco, it is not only possible, but necessary- in the light of her current poetic dancística.
To nurture her new form of dance, Mercedes turns to the flamenco and musical forms of the most fruitful and invigorating fishing grounds of flamenco: the furthest from today being the first third of the twentieth century and the closest being from the new silver age that were the decades from the sixties to the eighties of the last century: Pepa Oro, Chacón, Vallejo, Pastora, Sernita or Isabelita de Jerez, to name just a few; but also Ramón Montoya, Sabicas and Paco Cepero (who makes a very special collaboration in the show).
For the reconsideration of her dance, Mercedes needs the dialogue with the voices of the cantaores and musical sensibilities that transmit her the necessary impetus to feel, to create: something that the guest artists (David Palomar, David Lagos, Santiago Lara) provide her with in abundance: with their ancient knowledge and their current ways.
Mercedes Ruiz wants to dance for you all: feel with you all.
With your permission, of course.