In Dama de noche, Marta Gálvez builds a choreography around a simple natural fact: the flower opens at night, releases its perfume, and closes again with the first light. Rather than illustrating botany, the piece uses that cycle as a dramaturgical score for a woman’s artistic biography—how an inner life develops in the hours when the world is quieter, and how renewal can arrive after fatigue.

The work unfolds as a suite of scenes. Beginning at twilight, Gálvez enters a landscape of shadow and gradually moves toward floración: the moment when attention widens, the body becomes porous, and movement seems to listen before it speaks. Subsequent sections trace maturation and pollination—contact, desire, and exchange—before arriving at the emergence of fruit, imagined as a deepening of color against darkness. Throughout, memory is treated as physical residue; the dancer shifts weight and focus as if navigating through remembered spaces, allowing small changes of wrist, shoulder, or gaze to reframe the stage.

Gálvez’s choreographic language travels through multiple registers of danza española, from escuela bolera’s stylized clarity and ornament to flamenco passages built on structural play and rhythmic tension. Live music is central: singer David Lagos, guitarist José Almarcha, and cellist/voice-percussionist Isidora O’Ryan create an atmosphere that can move from intimacy to density, shaping how each scene breathes. The piece is directed and choreographed by Gálvez, with choreographic collaboration from La Venidera and an external eye from Juan Carlos Avecilla; lighting by Dominique You and Jesús Díaz and costumes by Belén de la Quintana and Gálvez support the work’s shifts from concealment to revelation. The closing of the flower becomes the final image—an ending that reads as a return, and as permission to begin again. 

Top photo: Beatrix Mexi Molnar