IRENE CANTERO SANZ

Photo David Jiménez

I am from Seville, in the south of Spain. I have a multidisciplinary practice that involves Movement and Light, mainly, which takes different forms depending on the context.
I have been studying Dance since I was five years old. I stopped dancing for a while when l was a teenager, but I got back to it soon. When I was seventeen, in 2003, I moved to Madrid to study Stage Design at The Royal Drama School (RESAD). Studying there I started to articulate a way of thinking through the body, space and light and I decided to focus my career on Lighting Design. Right after finishing, in 2008, I started Choreography at the ‘Conservatorio Superior de Danza María de Ávila’, also in Madrid, while I was already starting to work as Lighting Designer. My time at the Conservatory posed a huge challenge for me due to their approach to Choreography itself. Such struggle helped me discern how to translate what did not seem to fit my way of understanding movement, body and dance as tools to articulate my own intuitions on such matters. 
Right after finishing the conservatory I started to develop my own projects in order to keep learning about Choreography, processes, creation… In 2012 I had the opportunity of developing my Degree Project in collaboration with Matadero Madrid, therefore, a huge space with facilities was offered me to set up La acción del suicidioThe action on committing suicide–. We faced a long-durational performance for first time, I assumed my first big project as ‘leader’. I grew as performer and creator equally. In 2019 we reshowed this piece at Tenuta dello Scompiglio –an Art Centre in the Nature in Toscana, Italy–, inside a thematic season dedicated to Death.
Another milestone on the road was being Danceweber at the Impulstanz in 2013. Vienna was a challenging experience –in a different way than the conservatory– where we had the opportunity to push ourselves into a vast land of new knowledge in order to explore it as far as possible. We called it a great-freak-unique-dance-summer-trip, after which, I felt more secure with my dancing body and more concerned about what creation meant to me. 
At the same time I was developing my career as lighting designer. I started to work mainly with dance companies, given that I can understand both the lighting language and the dance one, and put them in dialogue. For some years did not deal with my double-sided career peacefully: I sometimes felt the pressure to choose one, either Light or Dance, because I did not find the time to dedicate to both. It took me a while to understand and embrace that the knowledge I acquire from one field always benefits the other. While designing lights I have been inside processes of very interesting artists, and I have been able to learn from them directly. I have worked in every single format and discipline: Opera, Zarzuela, Theatre, Dance, Performance, Visual Arts, Music… and crosses in between them. I have set lights in a lot of theaters in many countries so I have thoroughly learnt how this machine we call stage works. On the other hand, while dancing and creating my own projects, I have gained the resistance of a long-distance runner, finding ways of sustaining my own creative processes.
Once I admitted the impossibility of dedicating my time to just one discipline, I started to juggle with them. I design lights, work as assistant and go on tour with some companies. I was even a dance teacher in the conservatory of Granada for six months teaching Contemporary Dance, Composition and Improvisation. I work as performer for others from time to time. I am, or have been, part of some study groups –where we share an autodidactic way of learning together–: Corales, about Choreography and Gender; Déjame entrar, about Anatomy; a reading club about Art Practice. I give workshops or training, occasionally…
Although I really enjoy this eclectic life I sometimes need to focus on just one project. When possible, I prefer to go on residence somewhere. For a month in 2015 I was in La Fragua, an international residency program located in an old convent in a remote village of Cordoba, Andalusia –already closed due to lack of funding–. As half of the building was still occupied by nuns, I could breath the simplicity of their lives and arrive to an emptiness and concentration that I still try to conjure up when I am confused. At that moment, I realized I needed to be involved in some long time project. So l applied to one of the most precious opportunities l have ever had: the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome. I was in Rome in 2016-2017, I still recognize the traces Rome left inside me and I still use them now to widen my understandings. 
Last great journey, already finished, has been the New Performative Practices Master at DOCH –Uniarts– in Stockholm.