Artist statement
The Big Bouncers Collective are Cecilia Colacrai, Mireia de Querol and Anna Rubirola.
All the members of the Big Bouncers Collective are independent creators resident in Barcelona. They have a broad career as solo creators and in collaboration with other artists, as well as in teaching dance.
The collective received the Sebastià Gasch Award, Aplaudiment a la creació emergent, FAD 2015, for the piece BIG BOUNCE. In 2018, they were nominated for the Crítica de les Arts Escèniques (Catalonia) Award with O.V.N.I as the best national dance performance.
In 2019, Mercat de les Flors (Barcelona) invited the Big Bouncers to present several own works and works by associated artists within the framework of the theatre’s Constellation program.
They began working together in May 2012, sharing their interests and developing common practice, with the wish of researching and deepening new scenic languages and generating their own working methodology. Since the beginning, the collective’s work has been developed and articulated around three lines of action: creation of performances for stage, creation of “site-specific” performances for non-conventional spaces and pedagogy.
The collective’s interests and triggers lie in the body and its possibilities, although they want to overcome the limitations of dance in order to understand and treat each element that is part of the performance (scenography, lights, sound, objects, text, etc.) equally. For each new project, the Big Bouncers generate a specific practice that allows them to discover the physical language suitable for the proposal.
Their pieces created for the stage want to invite without imposing and to suggest without limiting the viewer’s imagination. The pieces the collective has created so far are: Big Bounce (2013), Big Bounce SiteSpecific (2013), Doppelganger (2014), I see a spider on the Wall (2014), O.V.N.I (2017), Acte Reflex (2018), Jungla (2018), If we were alone in the universe, it would be a great loss of space (2019) and A Day in the Jungle (short film 2020). At the moment the collective is working on the creation of PLANCTON, a piece directed by Anna Rubirola; and on the piece EL GARFI, a choreographic intervention for the work El Ganxo by Lola Lasurt at the Fundación Espai Brossa, directed by Mireia de Querol.
Over the years, the collective has presented its pieces in different venues and festivals such as: Teatre Mercat de les Flors, Festival Salmon, Festival El Més Petit de Tots, Fira de Tàrrega, Fundació La Pedrera, MACBA, Museu de la Ciència de Terrassa, Festival Sismògraf, Teatre Principal de Mallorca, Convent dels Arts d’Alcover, Antic Teatre, Festival Grec, La Caldera, El Graner, among others.
“(…)Without having any clear referent and defining itself as a “sponge of different sources and disciplines”, the Big Bouncers’ pieces deal with themes that arise from action and work. Their trajectory “has been to fit in the opportunities that the present gave us”, said Rubirola, and the fact is that the Big Bouncers don’t think too much about the future. What they do have is clear, however, is their way of acting. Pursuing a fresh and lively language, these three dancers take to the stage with the idea that their body must resolve some conflicts, but they do not know with which movements they will achieve this. “You know what you have to do but not how you will do it”, they explained. In this way and playing with space, they introduce error and constant dialogue between bodies in their pieces. (…)”
[ANNA CORNUDELLA. Núvol. L’apuntador.11/04/2019. ]
“(…)The creators of the Big Bouncers collective understand dance as a discipline that is not merely formal, but that, through images and compositions, must involve each spectator, each spectator, generating questions. The great virtue of their work is that they achieve it and that they make it seem very easy what we all too often have -wrongly- for impossible: that dance makes us think and stir consciences. (…)” [NILMARTÍN. Recomana.cat/Novaveu. 16/04/2019]
Other activities in which the collective has participated in recent years: Artistic experiences in the classroom Unfolding the Jungle in collaboration with the Ciutat Invisible Foundation within the framework of FestivalTemporada Alta, Girona (2021); Pedagogical project for teachers and primary schools organised by El Graner, 2019–2020; Primera Jornada Motors de creació 2019, a conference organised by the APDC association at the CCCB (Barcelona); En Residència 2018 Project at the secondary school Institut Moisès Broggi and promoted by Institut de Cultura de Barcelona (ICUB) and Consorci d’Educació de Barcelona(CEB); they teach the piece Big Bounce as part of the Repertori II program in CSD at Institut del Teatre de Barcelona; and they offer workshops of creation tools and family dance workshops in different places in Barcelona and around it.