More about the piece 

“If there is a heaven, it is here and now.”
Luis Buñuel

Sonoma is not a word that you will find in a dictionary. However, it contains phonemes from
Greek, soma (body) and Latin, sonum (sound): Sound body and body sound.

Today we experience history in a hurry, quickly, at such a fast pace that we are barely aware
of it. In fact, nobody knows what is happening anymore. You could say that we basically fall
forward, and during this rapid drop, we scream – like we do on roller coasters. Sonoma is
that sound of the body falling, the rage human beings feel for continuing to believe that we
are alive, that we are still awake.

Sonoma then, is the cry of man subjected to this rhythm, the limit of his existence; this is
where the primitive howl of the body, the pulse of humanity to survive and feel alive
emerges. To exist, even if it is at the limit of reality, or above it. Sonoma is the certainty that
the virtual and the digital can only be surpassed by returning to the origin.

Marcos Morau returns to the essential concepts of the piece he created in 2016 for the
Lorraine Ballet: “Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution” [Surrealism at the service of the
Revolution], based on the figure of Buñuel, and falling between medieval Calanda and
cosmopolitan Paris, and the Jesuit faith and surrealist freedom. That entire microcosm is
developed and expanded in Sonoma, for his project with La Veronal.

Sonoma emerged from the need to return to the origin, to the body, to the flesh. And from
that flesh and organic matter, one can lose themselves in a journey that flows between
dreams and fiction, where the human meets the extraordinary. To make everyday things
strange, renouncing the ability to construct meanings, allowing signs to germinate and
proliferate on their own; communicating with the most irrational layers of any human, there
where the united cries out to be separated, and the separated always seeks to re-join.

Because Sonoma also has another meaning, in an indigenous language it means: Valley of
the moon. According to myth, the moon nestles in its plains every night. And there the
screams, shrieks and beatings of the drums create a hypnotic beat, gentle, like a child’s
lullaby, and far from overstimulating us, the rhythm accompanies us and calms us.
Buñuel has never been so current: he was able to predict what the future held when he
found that cry pointing directly towards the viscera, in the noise of the drums from Calanda
and all of Bajo Aragón. Because Buñuel has already been here, listening to what the abyss
sounds like as it opens up when human imagination is free but man is not free.

“Sonoma begins with a scream and ends with a loud racket. In the middle, in a landscape between reality and fiction, a group of women try to free themselves from the bonds of the known, and cross frontiers using their intuition and instinct. When they come together, the inner cry they share is amplified, it grows until overflowing, and they celebrate it with rituals, offerings, hypnotic songs, and dances. They enter an unknown and bewildering state, a state that frees their minds but at the same time reminds them of their human condition. Sonoma is that place where the storm originates, where the drums continue to beat with a force that shakes the earth and opens a deep crack in the ground under our feet.“
Carmina S. Belda