Clara Pampyn’s “La intérprete” (a performer who is not an author) interrogates the labour of being a dancer. Pampyn, co-founder of the collective Laimperfecta and acclaimed performer in Spain, has spent years navigating the complex terrain of being “the interpreter,” the dancer who gives form to someone else’s vision. Her latest work emerges from a larger research project, titled “Las bailarinas no tocan el Cielo” (“female dancers do not touch the sky,” meaning that they do not reach fame or happiness), which gathered testimonies from more than sixty dance professionals about power, hierarchy, desire, and exhaustion within the field.

“La intérprete” is both a personal confession and a collective portrait: it is a solo, but Pampyn is never alone. The dramaturgy, developed with Alberto Alonso and Ana Botía, threads together fragment of confession, critique, and reckoning. The performance starts with a long monologue that the performer seems to be listening and repeating directly from the headphones: probably excerpts from interviews, from someone else’s artistic life.

The text lands with the clarity of someone naming what has long been felt but rarely spoken: the exhaustion of devotion, the confusion between love and survival. “Do you believe in love after work?” sings the performer, as she repeats the same routine over and over. A routine she built out of glimpses and echoes of choreographies (a nice game of recognising quotes, for the dance nerds). 

Her movement oscillates between precision and surrender. At times she seems to be demonstrating the mechanisms of performance; at others she appears caught inside them. “La interprete” becomes a figure suspended between agency and service, within systems of power, belief, and labour, revealing the invisible scaffolding that holds the dance world upright. The work is not accusatory: it is honest, and that honesty lands with force, poetry and irony.

Though “La carne del mundo” and “La intérprete” differ in tone and methodology they converge around a question: What does it mean to inhabit a body shaped by history, labour, and desire? Marote answers by returning to the body’s elemental truth, its capacity for celebration and connection. Pampyn answers by exposing the body’s entanglement in systems of work and meaning. Together, their works illuminate the dancer’s body as both sacred and exploited, powerful and tired, personal and relational.

Both remind us that the body is never just one thing: it is both “the flesh of the world,” and the one who carries the weight of making meanings tangible.