#INCUBATIO Circumambulatio is Muriel Romero's new work for the Compañía Nacional de Danza. Its Spanish premiere will take place on May 17 and 18 – Teatros del Canal – 40th Madrid en Danza Festival. Its world premiere will take place on May 9 in Baden-Baden, Germany.
We live in a time when it's increasingly difficult to find a space that allows us to isolate ourselves from external stimuli and connect with ourselves. The flow of information brought about by technological advancements leads us to focus our attention externally, to react and connect with any objective reality, while forgetting our subjectivity.
However, our psyche needs spaces isolated from this torrent of stimuli that surrounds us in order to connect with our inner images, which are increasingly outside rather than within us. #Incubatio – Circumambulatio is a choreographic work that reflects on this idea by reviving an ancient practice, incubatio, a technique oriented specifically toward a process of reassociation and reorganization of the psychological complexity of the human being, with the aim of enabling the development of a new center of personality.
The piece proposes a new hashtag, #Incubatio, which paradoxically invites us to disconnect from social media and connect with ourselves through interactive technology specially designed to connect with our bodies and translate dance into sound, image, and light.
The creative team for the work is composed of Muriel Romero and Pablo Palacio in idea and concept.
Choreography: Muriel Romero
Music: Pablo Palacio
Choreography Assistant: Arnau Pérez
Interactive Visual Simulation: Daniel Bisig
Lighting and stage design: Maxi Gilbert
Costume design: Bebé Espinosa
Digital Visualization: Daniel Bisig and Pedro Ribot
Motion capture: Pedro Ribot
Interactive sonification: Pablo Palacio
Software and interactive technology: Daniel Bisig, Pablo Palacio, Fernando Fernández, and Pedro Ribot
Light and laser programming: Daniel Bisig, Pedro Ribot and Pablo Palacio
Costume design: Tania Bakunova Studio
Muriel Romero (Murcia, 1972) began her studies in classical dance, Spanish dance, and music with Alicia Monteagudo Ros. At the age of 11, she enrolled in the Spanish National Ballet School, directed by María de Ávila. She continued her training with Lola de Ávila and simultaneously pursued a degree in classical dance, completing the free exam category, earning honors in all her courses. At 14, she won First Prize in the National Classical Dance Competition at the Barcelona City Competition, and at 15, the Prix du Paris at the prestigious Prix de Lausanne international competition.
In 1988, at the age of 16, she joined the National Dance Company under the direction of Maya Plisetskaya, where she danced leading roles in classics such as Marius Petipa's Paquita, Mikhail Fokine's Les Sylphides, and George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments. That same year, she performed at the International Ballet Competition in Moscow, where she won three awards: the Mikhail Baryshnikov Prize, the Critics' Prize, and the Audience Prize. From this moment on, she made her international breakthrough as first soloist with the Bayerische Staatsballett (Munich), where she expanded her repertoire with works from the 19th and 20th centuries.
In 1993, she performed at the Nationaltheater in Mannheim and in the Gala de Estrellas at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, consolidating her classical dance career as a principal dancer at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. In 1995, she returned to the Compañía Nacional de Danza under the direction of Nacho Duato, where she worked with prestigious 20th-century choreographers, including Jiří Kylián, Ohad Naharin, William Forsythe, and Saburô Teshigawara.
In 2000, she began her career as a freelance artist, exploring new formats and collaborating with avant-garde choreographers and playwrights such as La Ribot, Sasha Waltz, Cisco Aznar, Mateo Feijóo, and the Unterwegs Theater. She completed her career as a soloist with the Grand Théâtre de Genève and, later, from 2006 to 2008, as first soloist with the Semperoper Ballett in Dresden, under the direction of Canadian Aaron S. Watkin, where she deepened her artistic relationship with choreographer William Forsythe.
In 2008, together with composer Pablo Palacio, she founded the Stocos Institute, a transdisciplinary project that investigates the intersection of dance and technology through the combination of dance, music, mathematics, experimental psychology, and artificial intelligence. In her performances, she has developed an original vision in which the body becomes a place from which sound, image, and light emanate interactively. Many of her works have been performed at festivals in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
Furthermore, she has promoted and participated in prestigious European dance projects, alongside other institutions such as the Polytechnic University of Milan, the Università degli Studi di Genoa (Casa Paganini), Coventry University, and Motion Bank, a research project of the Forsythe Company. Through these projects, she has developed new techniques and technologies aimed at both the creation and teaching of dance and the preservation of European choreographic heritage.
In 2021, she obtained a scholarship from the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome in the Performing Arts category, with which she developed research on the relationship between visual arts, dance, interactive music, and artificial intelligence. This work was captured in the choreography Risonance Occulte, with music by Pablo Palacio. It was distributed in different stage and film formats at the Galleria Nacionale d'Arte Moderna and at Bramante's Tempietto in Rome.
In 2022, she premiered the production "Embodied Machine" with the Stocos Institute at the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona. In recent years, she has been working on a new European project under the Horizon Europe program.
Since September 2024, she has been the director of the National Dance Company.
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