'I have broken every bone on the left side of my body at least once. My knee ten years ago, my elbow five years later, a toe, a finger, and under my left eye I have a scar from a stone someone threw at me when I was a kid.' Jesús de Vega, a dancer, choreographer, videographer and teremin player, has had the requisite - 'All left. What it means exactly, I don't know, but it became clear that something was out of balance.'
Listen to the conversation I had with him here (in English):
He has now found that new balance in Choreopop, a performance he made with the versatile musician Chai Blaq. Choreopop is a live album of a dozen songs in which heavenly vocals, rousing percussion and sense-making electronics come together convincingly. In this dance concert, Jesús de Vega doesn't even use his body so much as a dancer anymore: he sets music in motion with it and lets you hear where it hurts. Literally in this case, as the opening track features the live amplified sound of his battered knee, incorporated into a rousing loop of Chai Blaq.
Changed forever
When I attend the show in The Hague, a shudder goes through the room every time he moves his microphone to his knee. 'It all started with that sound,' he tells me afterwards in the foyer of the Korzo Theatre. 'It's exactly the sound I heard, ten years ago, when I broke my knee during a dress rehearsal. I heard it, I felt it and I knew my life had changed forever. So that sound had to come back in this performance.'
The multi-talented man sitting opposite me in Korzo's foyer has come a long way before coming here. His roots are in Gran Canaria. There he learned to dance from Violetta.
'She is like my second mother. She had a dance school where boys got free lessons because she had a shortage of them.' Now it is not very obvious to take ballet lessons as a boy in Gran Canaria. 'You have to know, Gran Canaria in the 1990s was like any other country in the 1940s. It was quite behind.'
Pirate's Eye
Jesús de Vega was already not a popular boy, he recalls: 'I had a lazy eye, was fat, did not get along well in sports and spoke very wise because I read a lot of books. That's why I was bullied. I was the fat kid with the pirate patch. When I got the chance to go dancing, I had nothing left to lose. Once in that ballet class, everyone knew for sure: that's a faggot. People threw stones through the windows.' One of those stones hit him under the left eye.
'I haven't lived other people's lives, so I can't say it was the worst childhood of all, but for me it was. It was a childhood that couldn't help but make me want to leave. My work reflects that. The fact that I come from a very small island, where there are awe-inspiring volcanoes, and beautiful beaches. It has everything of a mini-continent: it is the whole world and very small at the same time. The sense of isolation is very strong. That's all in my work. There must always be something that causes friction.'
Of the boys Violetta had asked for her ballet class, only he remained. Jesús pushed hard and once in Madrid, where he had started studying journalism, he was asked to participate in an open-air festival in the city. Since that day, he has been a professional dancer.
Chai Blaq
'I started dancing because I felt that was my tribe was. Those are my people. I also knew that if I was not surrounded by the right people, I had to go looking for them. Maybe I wasn't aware of it at nine, but that was what drove me.'
His career took him via Iceland to Groningen, and now Amsterdam, where he gets to pursue his ideas at Dansmakers and ICK. An idea, which resulted from a one-off intended collaboration for two songs with Chai Blaq in Maastricht. It clicked. The two songs formed the basis for Choreopop, the performance that now has a successful tour of theatres in the Netherlands.
'Somehow, I was always in the right place at the right time. I am one of those dancers whose career went completely by itself. I didn't plan anything. It was always that when I wanted to do something else, someone came along and offered me that other thing.'
He has come from far, and from deep, and now seems to be in place. Yet something also gnaws back. The loneliness of working on something as complicated as Choreopop - lots of electronics, projections, sophisticated lighting and sound direction - also sometimes oppresses him. 'Now there is another one of those periods when I doubt everything. So probably another one of those changes is coming now.'
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