Borboleta do Céu e da Terra is a solo dance work with experimental live music that unfolds as a journey through memory, identity, and transformation. Drawing from Flamenco and Butoh, the piece navigates the tension between rootedness and dissolution, tracing a path toward a more essential and liberated state of being.

At its core, the work engages with histories of displacement and marginalization. Flamenco carries within it the long migration of the Romani people, a culture shaped through exile, resistance, and constant transformation. In contrast, Butoh approaches suffering from a place of dissolution, stripping away constructed identities to reveal what lies beneath. One builds in order to survive; the other dismantles in order to liberate. Between them, a shared intensity emerges — a fire that speaks through the body.

This encounter is not only aesthetic but also historical. The founder of Butoh, Kazuo Ohno, was deeply influenced by the Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé “La Argentina.” Borboleta do Céu e da Terra continues this dialogue from a contemporary perspective, bringing it into a new geography through the collaboration with Taiwanese experimental musician Chia-Chun Xu. Together, they create a cross-cultural landscape where sound and movement interact as raw, physical forces.

The piece also unfolds as a personal exodus. After formal training in Spanish dance, Virginia Torres distanced herself from institutional practice, confronted by systems of aesthetic control and social pressure that turned dance into a space of constraint. What follows is a search — not only for an individual voice, but for a deeper, embodied memory that precedes form.

This search expands beyond the personal, connecting with ancestral and feminine lineages. Borboleta do Céu e da Terra is a dance in honor of the grandmothers — of the women whose bodies carried silence, restriction, and unexpressed movement. Through the act of dancing, the piece becomes a space of transformation: a way of releasing inherited tension, of reconfiguring memory, and of giving voice to what has been historically silenced.

Moving between Spain and Asia, the work proposes a new cartography of Flamenco — a “flamenco de ida y vuelta” that does not look toward Latin America, but toward the East. It is a return that does not replicate the past, but reimagines it, allowing tradition to remain alive through change.