In Aurora, Lina Gómez’s dancing meets the interplay of evolving light and sound by Alejandra Cárdenas (Ale Hop) and Bruno Pocheron at DOCK11 on 22 June as part of soundance festival berlin 2025.
Aurora opens like the quiet stillness before dawn, unfolding in Prenzlauer Berg’s evening light just before summer’s setting sun.Lina Gómez sits against the exposed brick on the back wall, calmly observing the audience fill the seating banks ahead of her. Light is dim and diffused, suspended between brightness and shadow, mingling past, present, and a sense of what’s to come: a state of fading and arrival, stillness in motion, clarity.
Ale Hop gradually produces ambient, experimental resonance, with electric guitar and modular synthesiser, recalling Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. As the performance develops, the soundscape deconstructs. Reminiscent of pioneering synthesiser music, it evolves as landscapes—each revealing a new reality with sonic pulsing, tinkling, dripping, and shimmering—without discernible transitions, one fluid transformation.
Gómez’s dancing shines like the arrival of the sun upon dormant earth, with glistening movements that rise from beneath, her body a conduit expanding force into space. She is moved like a responsive, resistant substance, a body of water and air that conducts currents and gusts passing through. She pops, glides and floats, energy emanating in rushes, spirals and billows. Gómez is a highly skilled improviser whose dancing co-composes time and space, rather than being dictated by conventional, systematic coordination. While embodying the sense of ‘new beginning’ of dawn, Aurora doesn’t attempt innovation; instead, it taps into timeless, natural phenomena surrendering to the complex breadth of elemental cycles that guide us.
The work’s title refers to the figure of an unbounded goddess who rejoices in the specificities of presence as sound, light, and dancing. Gómez performs with a curious smile playing at her mouth, brightening the twinkle in her eyes, which are often obscured by flowing hair.
She wears an iridescent chiffon singlet that shines gold, green and blue, blending to a deep wine coloured hue as she moves through the imperceptibly changing light. At one point, she disappears behind an indentation of the wall stage right and reemerges with lighter, bluish-purplish, opalescent pants: the sky brightens as day appears. Large swathes of chiffon fabric lie in the corners of the space along the skirting, the same dark green-plum tones as her top. I wonder if she will eventually interact directly with this object scenography, a dramaturgically common event in much contemporary dance. I am glad this fabric is left as part of the environment, changed only by the light’s intensities. Gómez begins to orbit the space with celestial spinning. She gradually pulls her translucent top off over her head. She clutches it in her fist, and it becomes invisible. Like stars, bright lights disappear yet continue to exist and reappear. She dances close to the front row of seats, and hands the shiny article to a child: a simple, luminous transmission.
Aurora, by Lina Gómez was performed at DOCK11 on 22 June as part of soundance festival berlin 2025.
