2021 Kandelak

KANDELAK 2021

A small candle is enough to illuminate the darkest room. Anyone who has had to wait for something, such as a phone call or good news, in the middle of the night knows it well.

He sat in front of the candle, for he had nothing else to hold on to but a slippery time offered by the doctors: twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours is the dose that medicine demands from patience.

He embraced the light with all his being, prostrating himself at the foot of the candle, not being a believer, but believing blindly in the power of love. I needed to light that candle, to contemplate the sweet movement of the tiny wave of fire that suddenly trembled, even with the window closed. She needed the candle to light her dark room, and to tell her, “There’s the door, there’s your chair, here you are. Don’t worry. He asked for everything that can be asked of a candle. The candle answered him everything he knew how to say.

He burned a total of twenty-five hours. A part of him was consumed with each candle, his inner threads blackened and charred from waiting so long. Tears of hardened wax on her scorched eyelashes.

However, it may be that, after twenty-five o’clock, the morning light broke through his curtains, dissolving the night and thus illuminating, as if involuntarily, the desk, the chair, the door, and an extensive row of candles and charred fears.

The show

The dancer Garazi Etxaburu will give life to a large wooden sculpture created by Jose Pablo Arriaga. Its vibrant and subtle choreography will evoke the movements of a candle flame.

The sculpture, formed by overlapping and folded layers, can symbolize the skin of a pregnant woman’s womb, that space that for so long has sheltered and protected a new life. But it may happen that these layers will have to be cut when the time comes to extract what is inside them. It could be a baby, it could be anguish, or even old ghosts that used to live under our skin. You have to extract them if you want to live.

Then it is time to stitch the wound, gently and precisely, so that our skin can heal and renew itself. And it will be that hated time, the one that burned us in front of the candle, the one that dries our wound and draws an eternal scar, and maybe, someday we will thank him for having taught us to wait.