Arkanum

A danceplay from 2007 based on Jungian archetypical meanings of Tarot cards.

The Mexican company Contempodanza released the artplay in several seasons since the first time. The script was based on an oracular reading performed by the founder teacher, Cecilia Lugo, and on the stories from the book The castle of crossed destinies, by Ítalo Calvino. Lugo created a play for six participants to perform on stage the roles of seven major arcana: The Hanged Man, The Lovers, The Devil, The Sun, The Wheel of Fortune, The Magician and Temperance.

Rituals, nudity, reincarnation, elementals, decisions, exploring, thirst and searches are all components of a scenic narration offering a contemplative discourse, including metaphors about luck and truth by starting from a conceptual premise:

"The water you're searching for is in the centre of your well."

Cecilia Lugo

For instance: the play begins displaying naked characters to be dressed up later, which symbolizes reincarnation. Alluding to love, violence, identity and decisions made inside of conflictive situations, the play explores psychic shadows, represented by red water (blood metaphor), and inner introspective states, like The Hanged Man who performs a twist while searching for the unconscious after experiencing an undefinite space…

The narration was created by gathering several disciplines: dance, music, scenography and painting. For instance, Alberto Castro Leñero was in charge of the scenography and, in one of the seasons, it was also possible to enjoy his play Incruce composed by 10 bronze T-shaped reliefs of 30.31" x 25.19". Rather than characters, each piece referred to a virtue, an attitude or a function, more related to Tarot's archetypes.

Alberto said: "I try to represent different virtues or qualities that I perceive in my life, in life. It refers to laws or functions. For instance the words sacrifice, growth, reverberation, balance, time. There's a system described as the attributes of the being, an esoteric scheme called Sefirot, visually a kind of molecular structure that I took as a reference to shape the curtain".

Although each dancer was assigned to a Tarot card, their characters didn't remained fixated to the associated archetype and, instead, they moved across different places, changing identities along with music and motion. The sensorial and emotional experience of the play suggests a pathway, a search and a discovery, expressing transformations inside of Jungian psychism, like nuances of a sonic landscape emerging from the whole scene.

The director based the play on major cards alghouth they were not just used to write the script but also to symbolize the work of everyone involved in the process, including herself and her sister María Teresa: Cecilia Lugo and The Hanged Man (direction and choreography), María Teresa Lugo and The Priestess (coordination), Alberto Castro Leñero and The Hermit (scenography and props), Joaquín López Chas and The Fool (music), Xóchitl Gonzálezx and The World (illumination), Jerildy Bosch and The Empress (custom), and dancers Guadalupe Acosta (The Devil), Ana Paula Oropeza (The Wheel of Fortune), Jorge Rozñon (Temperance), Lino Perea (The Sun), Aileen Kent (The Magician), and Ugo Ruiz (The Lovers).

Since December 2023, Contempodanza has announced on Facebook that the company's activities are indefinitely suspended. Anyway, you can still access its channel on Youtube, and connect on Instagram and Facebook.