Judith Sánchez Ruíz

A distillation of Sánchez’s storied 30-year international career in performance and choreography. Let’s Talk About Bleeding draws on a composite of her artwork and writing and was created in collaboration with all artists involved.   

 Sánchez’s dance pieces are existential in nature and tend to layer their subjects structurally like a geologic stratum. Of Let’s Talk About Bleeding, Sánchez writes, “It is a symphony of layers, a metaverse in which multiple universes collide, seeming to exist simultaneously, yet viewed in segments. The work intends to convey the notion of moving backward in time, recreating realities that make us question the arc of human existence. Half the scenes are reversed, underscoring the idea of reversing time itself and deepening an understanding of being. The piece an architectural orgasm of poetical constellations.” 

A former dancer for the TBDC, Judith Sánchez Ruíz was chosen as the Company’s first artist to be commissioned by virtue of her reputation for mastery of structured improvisation, as improvisation was decisively central to Trisha Brown’s work. Since the debut of her acclaimed 2017 solo ENCAJE, Sánchez has been using “radio vocabularies” of dance, techniques that produce unexpected movement by creating improvisational channels in each dancer. It is, she says, “an emancipation from within in the way they perform.” She is also the author of a choreographic tool she calls “100 legs,” which is based on the recognition that each part of the human body has its own innate intelligence; it encourages localized movement at oppositional points within the dancer’s body, which generates a kinetic tension. These very physical vocabularies are designed to deliver insightful, meaningful narratives and cohesive structures.