For two days, Elena Córdoba invites participants to focus on an element that is often invisible, yet essential: heat. Heat as the primary movement of life. As a silent language. Continuously produced and dissipated—through the skin, through breathing, through hair—heat is explored here as choreographic material and a means of connection.
With a unique voice in contemporary Spanish dance, Madrid-based dancer and choreographer Elena Córdoba has been developing an approach to the limits of the body and life for decades, incisively exploring the anatomy and degradation of living matter. For her, anatomy is not a technical or medical exercise, but a poetic path to knowledge: an attentive gesture that approaches the body with curiosity, care, and imagination.
What if the heat we emit were visible? What if we could extend our bodies until they became ether? In this workshop, imagine a space where air becomes common fabric and bodies understand each other not through words, but through the temperature they share. An environment where the boundaries between “I” and “you” blur, and touch occurs at a distance, through the sensitive density of space.
The “Poetic Anatomy” laboratory proposes a dissection of the living body—a microscopic listening to its internal movements, a dive into the invisible as a place of creation. An invitation to perceive the body as a landscape in combustion, where heat is both matter and metaphor for relationship.
Elena Córdoba was born in Madrid in 1961. She is a dancer. Her work has been built through detailed observation of the body, the center of all her concerns. Her work is based on attention to detail, on a careful look at events. Over time, these events have become increasingly smaller and more fragmented, leading to a distinct space between the body and the physical, between the body and its surroundings.
