ALICE GODFREY

WE LOVE WOMEN 


PHOTOS BY LOURDES CABRERA & JUAN GAVILÁN

Alice Godfrey had never been to Mallorca before visiting Palma this April to dance in EL AMOR x Sa Llotja, the inaugural performance of Palma’s contemporary dance festival, Palma Dansa. But the Paris-based dancer had spent time with director Eduardo Rivero and had carefully learned his vision. The dance would unfold as an organic dialogue between Alice’s contemporary style, the traditional flamenco of Francisco Velasco, the soundscape of Adrián de Alfonso, and the voices of the cantaor Jose Luis Hernández and Ars Vocem choir. The performance would be experimental, activated also by the audience and the architecture of Sa Llotja, a 15th-century Gothic hall overlooking the vast Palma bay. It would be different from Alice’s rigorously choreographed work for renowned dance company S-E-D. “This performance in Mallorca was the totally other side of the spectrum,” says Alice. “It was really just about showing up and listening.”

Looking up for the first time at the soaring arcs of Sa Llotja, Alice felt the core of Rivero’s idea course through her—how his dance brought together pure natural elements. She sensed the weight of Sa Llotja’s stillness: “It was resonating sound and light.” She witnessed the vigor in Velasco’s dance and understood that his element was fire, that the way he dug his heel into the ground was earth. And she understood that in response, her element would be fluid: “Something quite experimental.” Something “like liquid or air. Something almost evaporating, and something cooler.” Alice would swim and sliver around Velasco’s thunder. “Something between a cloud and a cat.”

To design the performance's costumes, Rivero turned to Rosa Esteva. Rosa’s long held relationship to movement and the performing arts derives from her view of the body as a vehicle of expression not only through fashion, but through gesture, rhythm, and emotion. Dance, in particular, has been a constant source of inspiration to Rosa’s creative process. Over the years, she has collaborated on several projects in contemporary dance, creating garments that speak to both the poetics of the stage and the fluidity of the human form.

Following EL AMOR’s conceptual take on the elements, Rosa dressed background performers in suits of undyed linen that seemed to emanate from the naked architecture. Raw edges echoed the choreography, unwritten, and a medieval note recalled Sa Llotja’s history as a market.

As for Alice, Rosa understood the need for levity. She dressed the dancer in a tulle bodysuit the color of her pale skin, and placed over it a short tunic made of fishing net with a hood. The net spoke of Mallorca’s historic fishing practice, while faintly resembling the shimmering scales of a fish.

“Whatever you wear, it's always making you behave a certain way,” says Alice. “I really feel sensitive to how what you’re wearing makes you feel.” Just as she composed her dance around the moves of her partner, the mass of the building, and the reverberating music, Alice let the feeling of Cortana be her guide. “I felt the delicacy of it, and I felt the transparency of it, and the fragility of it. But then at the same time, it had this layer: that fragility can also be strong. And I think I tried to play into that.”

The suit’s nudity summoned the freedom of the air and the water embodied in Alice’s movement: “It was very light. Almost like having a second skin.” “Then the hood, the hood had something cool.” The hood bore a sense of mystery and nobility. “I think nobility is a beautiful quality, and I felt a deconstructed kind of version of nobility from this costume.” There was also a spiritual aura: “I felt like Mary at some point, and it was something I could play with.” Later, in photos, Alice saw herself looking like a knight dueling amid the Gothic arches. “I relate to something about this knighthood. It's so regal and so beautiful. And I think I also play with this spirit in my dancing. So, it felt really fitting.” She adds: “It's something that continuously interests me in dance: how you can be so soft and so strong.”


Light yet regal in her second skin, Alice shifted among Sa Llotja’s winding columns, weaving contemporary movement between flamenco’s traditional song and dance. “Everything was improvised on my part.” To Alice, dance is always about connection. “There's something always about the meeting of the audience. But I think this performance was really trying to listen and trying to be open to the whole space.” EL AMOR joined in dance not only elements of air, water, fire, and earth, but also the presence of architecture, history, audience, and sound. It combined, for Alice, “something luminous, something dignified, something strong, something soft.” Alice let each element move through her body, swimming in the rhythm of the island, and, just outside Sa Llotja, the sea beyond the Palma Bay. 

WORDS BY TERESA BROCK MONEO