Numbed the thorn/Entumecida la espina (WIP)
July 2025
Creation & performance: Blanca Gómez Terán
Sound Design / Live Electronics: Till Bürgin
Light design: Collective process - WIP (Lagha Ghavam, Carlos Frahke, Blanca Gómez Terán).
Outside eyes & co-thinking in the dark: Till Bürgin, Murillo Basso, Isidora Gazmuri, Óscar H.Tristancho, Aleksandra Nowakowska, Lagha Ghavam, Micaela Odriozola
Especial Thanks: Ángela MIllano, annu koetter, Azahara Sanz, Bojana Kunst, Carol Mendonça, Catalina Insignares, Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Giulia Casartelli, Julian Sorter, Katya Kaliuzhnaia, Mila Pavićević, Morteza Zarei, Pablo Santacana, René Alejandro Huari Mateus, Vicente Antunes and Xavier Le Roy.
Fotos: Nargess Behrouzian
Video: Antje Cordes and Malin Harff
Numbed the Thorn is a choreographic research inspired by the ghost-train ride where spectators voluntarily enter a fiction of fear to experience, among other things, the dopamine rush that fear produces.
The piece adopts darkness, spectacle, and heartbreak as intersecting lenses through which to question how we desire, perceive, and relate with fear. Numbed the Thorn explores darkness as a condition that suspends the primacy of vision an resist ideals of visibility, transparency, and control.
Within this unstable field, it interrogates spectacle as a contemporary economy of attention and affect, recycling its mechanisms to expose how emotional manipulation circulates across entertainment, media, performance, and cinema. By mobilizing the very tools of spectacle, the piece tries to reflect on and intervene in these dynamics from within.
These formal explorations carry an intimate charge. Through shadows and spectral imagery, the work touches experiences of grief, fear, and pain on the female body, materials with which the body on stage has worked to navigate moments of extreme vulnerability and uncertainty. Therefore, the work becomes both a political reflection and a deeply personal attempt to make space for the cry — which, at it core, amounts to the same interest: making room for the shadow.
Body, sound, and light work as a trio, which generates a stream of images that continually overlap, assemble, and collapse. Expectations and meanings are twisted, producing spectral traces that come and go.The work could be imagined as a melodramatic baroque retablo, with a broken heart, that makes room for the shadow and that, exaggerating, twisting, and exposing the mechanism of artifice itself, offers lifeless images that travel across screens and reproduce endlessly:
(...) a dead corpse, a 60’s diva, flies, a woman twerking a Holy Week procession march; pearls; Our Lady of Sorrows; a funk track; whispers, saliva; a Bach symphony, a garden (...)
Creation & performance: Blanca Gómez Terán
Sound Design / Live Electronics: Till Bürgin
Light design: Collective process - WIP (Lagha Ghavam, Carlos Frahke, Blanca Gómez Terán).
Outside eyes & co-thinking in the dark: Till Bürgin, Murillo Basso, Isidora Gazmuri, Óscar H.Tristancho, Aleksandra Nowakowska, Lagha Ghavam, Micaela Odriozola
Especial Thanks: Ángela MIllano, annu koetter, Azahara Sanz, Bojana Kunst, Carol Mendonça, Catalina Insignares, Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Giulia Casartelli, Julian Sorter, Katya Kaliuzhnaia, Mila Pavićević, Morteza Zarei, Pablo Santacana, René Alejandro Huari Mateus, Vicente Antunes and Xavier Le Roy.
Fotos: Nargess Behrouzian
Video: Antje Cordes and Malin Harff
Numbed the Thorn is a choreographic research inspired by the ghost-train ride where spectators voluntarily enter a fiction of fear to experience, among other things, the dopamine rush that fear produces.
The piece adopts darkness, spectacle, and heartbreak as intersecting lenses through which to question how we desire, perceive, and relate with fear. Numbed the Thorn explores darkness as a condition that suspends the primacy of vision an resist ideals of visibility, transparency, and control.
Within this unstable field, it interrogates spectacle as a contemporary economy of attention and affect, recycling its mechanisms to expose how emotional manipulation circulates across entertainment, media, performance, and cinema. By mobilizing the very tools of spectacle, the piece tries to reflect on and intervene in these dynamics from within.
These formal explorations carry an intimate charge. Through shadows and spectral imagery, the work touches experiences of grief, fear, and pain on the female body, materials with which the body on stage has worked to navigate moments of extreme vulnerability and uncertainty. Therefore, the work becomes both a political reflection and a deeply personal attempt to make space for the cry — which, at it core, amounts to the same interest: making room for the shadow.
Body, sound, and light work as a trio, which generates a stream of images that continually overlap, assemble, and collapse. Expectations and meanings are twisted, producing spectral traces that come and go.The work could be imagined as a melodramatic baroque retablo, with a broken heart, that makes room for the shadow and that, exaggerating, twisting, and exposing the mechanism of artifice itself, offers lifeless images that travel across screens and reproduce endlessly:
(...) a dead corpse, a 60’s diva, flies, a woman twerking a Holy Week procession march; pearls; Our Lady of Sorrows; a funk track; whispers, saliva; a Bach symphony, a garden (...)