As part of the 2025 edition of the International DANCE Festival Munich, Marcos Morau’s company La Veronal will be performing in the city for the first time. Anna Beke explores the dreamscapes of the multifaceted Spanish artist. A portrait.

He is considered one of the most visionary creators of dance in our time: the versatile artist Marcos Morau, trained between Barcelona and New York. His name has long since spread beyond his Catalan homeland, and he performs across the globe, from Paris to Seoul, from Venice to Montreal. In 2005, he founded the collective La Veronal in Barcelona, named after the barbiturate of the same name, which consists of artists from the fields of dance, film, photography, and literature, embodying the intersection that represents the multidisciplinary artist himself. In his synesthetic total works of art, he strives for a symbiosis of memorable imagery and powerful movement language, continually challenging our habits of seeing. Morau has performed with La Veronal in over thirty countries or developed works with other companies, including the Biennale di Venezia, the Avignon Festival, Tanz im August in Berlin, Nederlands Dans Theater, Ballet Zürich, and Staatsballett Berlin, where he has been an “Artist in Residence” since 2023. Besides numerous national and international awards, Morau is recognized as the youngest recipient of the Premio Nacional de Danza; in 2023, he was awarded the French “Order of Arts and Letters,” and concurrently, he was named “Choreographer of the Year” in the critics' poll of the magazine TANZ. It is an exceptional artistic career of the 21st century that seemingly knows only a steep upward trajectory.

Interdisciplinary Aesthetics

Morau, who was not a dancer himself, received a nearly universal artistic education in film, dramaturgy, performing arts, and choreography—a diversity that finds application in his theatrical works. He masterfully creates imaginary visual worlds that simultaneously reflect both artistic reduction and abundance. His often surreal interpretations reference film noir and figures such as Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, or David Lynch. Not infrequently, he reaches into a dark color palette, as he is also responsible for the set and lighting design of his productions. Nothing is random or secondary in these staged works, where each artistic medium holds equal elemental significance. The set design often reflects a historically conscious view, looking both backward and forward, with costumes that at times seem entirely futuristic. This comprehensive aesthetic is characteristic of Morau's artistic work, where past, present, and future connect in a timeless space of imaginary abstraction and freedom, forming a new language of expression. Without naming it explicitly, Morau confronts his audience with the essential questions that move the world and reflects on the cruelly beautiful essence of humanity.

Freud Sends His Regards

In a spectacular manner, the Catalan artist brings together opposites, blurring realities, turning the familiar upside down, and skillfully working with reinterpretations, resulting in fascinating shifts in perspective. In his precision, he remains abstract; a dream mutates into a nightmare, and reality tilts into the surreal. With a light touch, Morau designs worlds of being reminiscent of an absurd theater, which evoke familiar images that, through the alienation of small yet decisive details, change existential aesthetics and habits. A sense of threat and disturbance emanates from Morau's works. They seem to have been borrowed from the darkness of the unconscious that Sigmund Freud dedicated his life and research to. At the core of Morau's reflections lies the phenomenon of humanity in all its beauty and monstrosity. He subtly draws his audience into abysses and develops a captivating pull with his delicate yet powerful works, from which one cannot escape. Without explicitly naming it, Morau confronts his audience with the essential questions that move the world and reflects on the cruelly beautiful nature of humanity: What defines our species? Where does the beginning or the end of our existence lie? What comes after death? What constitutes final failure, and what constitutes success? He explores these philosophically profound questions in various ways, provoking thought without ever pushing for resolution. Questions are, after all, more intriguing than answers.

Surreal Imagery

In Siena—one of the many pieces by the choreographer that bears the name of a city without actually relating to its content—Morau takes his audience on a surreal trip into the Italian Renaissance and deals with the notorious human compulsion to constantly observe and dissect oneself. He places the iconic Titian painting Venus of Urbino at the heart of this inquiry, revealing both performers and spectators as a voyeuristic community, in which each individual remains isolated and lonely.

In Overture—a commissioned work for Staatsballett Berlin—he designs larger-than-life images, where a surging, expressively plastic mass of bodies merges into a unity to Gustav Mahler's powerful Fifth Symphony; however, in its complex interconnections of limbs, it does not harmonize but rather erupts and contrasts in a fragmentary way. Everything individual seems to be obliterated and negated in this overwhelming flood of bodies.

In Afanador, a homage to the Colombian photographer Ruvén Afanador, Morau leaves behind classicism and relies on pounding techno beats and mechanical movements in his highly stylized movement tableaus. Here, the artist plays with flamenco aesthetics, cultural identities, and questions gender roles and clichés.

In Nachtträume, his first full-length work for Ballett Zürich, which earned him the designation of "Choreographer of the Year" from TANZ, Morau celebrates a darkly morbid stage party that resembles a cabinet of horrors with the headless and almost Kafkaesque beings presented within it. Surreal images arise and fade, exerting a hypnotic effect on the audience with their obsessive intensity and cinematic aesthetics.

In his work TOTENTANZ – Morgen ist die Frage, created for the Triennale Milano in 2024, Marcos Morau once again addresses an existential theme—the reflection on what comes after today in the midst of this unbearable political present. The German term "Morgen ist die Frage" (“Tomorrow Is the Question”) was emblazoned in 2020 during the pandemic as a banner on the facade of the legendary Berlin club Berghain—a project by artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. The words have lost none of their relevance. Are we as humanity already caught in a Danse Macabre without realizing it? Is the end in sight? This avant-garde exceptional artist will be presented for the first time to the audience in Munich with this urgently radical work. One can only hope today that this highly anticipated performance by La Veronal at the Dance Biennale DANCE will be followed by a tomorrow.

By Anna Beke

MARCOS MORAU
Marcos Morau is a choreographer and director. In 2004, he founded La Veronal, a Barcelona-based company that has gained international acclaim. In 2023, Morau was awarded the Order of Arts and Letters and named Choreographer of the Year. His work unfolds at the intersection of dance, theatre, and visual art.