Meeting between Mariantònia Oliver and María Muñoz to work together on the creation process of Malmenats/Badly Treated, a new performance project by the Mariantòniaoliver company, a piece first created and performed by the Mallorcan choreographer with Pepón Prades, Jaume Manresa and Pedro Mas. This is a parenthesis in her residency at El Graner, a centre for body and movement creation in Barcelona, to share another view of movement, presence and the body.

Malmenar: to mistreat, harass, allow to deteriorate, treat without care or consideration, treat violently, cruelly or without delicacy.

Malmenats, from the verb malmenar, a word used in various ways in Mallorca. It mainly means to treat any old how, without consideration, without any care. It implies harshness, sometimes violence, though it can also be a roughness that includes affection and feeling.
You can malmenar – mistreat – objects, animals or people, causing them harm. The four performers of this piece share a sense of being mistreated, of being malmenats.
This feeling shows in our lives as individual members of a society hard hit by crisis in every way, as part of a system that seems organised precisely for this purpose, to mistreat.
We feel trapped in a drift, a coming and going this way and that, propelled by forces that always appear harsh, dirty, brutal and thoughtless.

What are we to do? Where should we go? What role does resistance play in changing the direction of this movement? Where are these competing forces taking us?

The aim of this piece is to show clearly the physicality of the movement, stripped of anything superfluous, even slightly crude. The performers are one woman and three men with very different physiques, ages, presences, careers and life stories. We are the age we are, with the body and the baggage that we have. And despite this we stand up in front of the audience. This is the aim of our project and the risk we take. Because we believe we cannot tackle these questions without accepting one unrelinquishable assumption: that we do not know if there will be answers to our questions and, above all, if we will be able to find them.

Photography: Aida vargas, Maria Antònia Oliver