Together we can reach things we couldn't alone
New work 'Faula' explores humanity's extraordinary ability to imagine, fabulize, and pursue shared dreams through interconnected bodies and collaborative movement. Eight dancers from hip-hop, urban dance, and contemporary backgrounds create organic collective forms without homogenization, emphasizing individual singularity within community.
- 'Faula' premieres October 1 at Barcelona's Mercat de les Flors, running through October 12
- Eight dancers from hip-hop, urban dance, and contemporary backgrounds
- Production will tour eight Catalan cities and appear at Temporada Alta festival
- Choreographer trained in Amsterdam and Vienna
Choreographer Roser López Espinosa premieres 'Faula,' a large-format dance piece celebrating human capacity for imagination and community at Barcelona's Mercat de les Flors, featuring eight dancers from diverse backgrounds.
Roser López Espinosa has chosen an unlikely moment to celebrate what humans can do together. In a season marked by conflict, economic strain, and environmental collapse, the Barcelona choreographer is opening the Mercat de les Flors this week with a work that looks deliberately away from catastrophe and toward collective possibility. 'Faula'—premiering Thursday and running through October 12—is her statement of faith in shared imagination.
The piece centers on a word López Espinosa finds essential: fabular, the root of fabuloso, meaning to tell stories, to invoke shared dreams. Since prehistory, she notes, humans have done this together—not just imagining in isolation but pursuing visions as a community. 'Faula' is built on that premise. It's a large-scale work for eight dancers, half of them longtime collaborators, drawn from hip-hop, urban dance, and contemporary backgrounds. They are, by design, different from one another. The choreography asks them to move as a single organism without erasing those differences.
López Espinosa has composed the piece like a puzzle made of interlocked bodies. The dancers create what she calls organic collective forms—acrobatic structures that seem to emerge from nowhere, held together by interconnection and mutual support. They move across the floor and through the air, experimenting with shapes that would be impossible alone. The risk is homogenization, the flattening of individual voices into a single mass. The goal is the opposite: to find the enormous potential that emerges when distinct bodies move together without losing their singularity. "Juntos podemos alcanzar cosas que no haríamos solos," she says—together we can reach things we couldn't alone.
This vision isn't new to López Espinosa. She explored similar territory in 'L'estol,' which premiered at the Mercat in 2021 and has since become a repertory work for the Scottish Dance Theater. But 'Faula' deepens the inquiry. The piece is scored with two kinds of music running in parallel: one powerful and electric, built on rock guitars; the other delicate and atmospheric. They represent the dual dimensions López Espinosa is investigating—the collective imagination and the individual voice, held in tension and conversation.
The production reunites her with longtime collaborators: dramaturg Katarina Pejovic, composer Mark Drillich, and BCube, who designed the space and lighting. López Espinosa trained in Amsterdam and Vienna, and her work has circulated through European networks. 'Faula' will tour eight Catalan cities and appear at the Temporada Alta festival during its international programming week, positioning her vision within a broader continental conversation about what dance can say about human capacity.
The new director of the Mercat, speaking at the premiere, called López Espinosa's approach to fable-making "very interesting in the current landscape." It's a careful way of saying what the work itself insists: that in a time of fracture, the act of imagining together, of invoking shared stories and celebrating what we can build when we move as one—that matters. The invitation, as López Espinosa frames it, is simple: find each other, invoke our capacity to imagine, and celebrate what we can do together.
Citas Notables
This piece wants to show everything extraordinary about humanity, starting with our capacity to tell stories—a word that's the root of 'fabulous,' which we use to describe something magnificent.— Roser López Espinosa
Sometimes collective bodies seem impossible, but when you get them moving together, adding without erasing difference, the potential is enormous.— Roser López Espinosa
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why does a choreographer choose to make work about collective hope right now, when the news is so dark?
Because the darkness is exactly why. López Espinosa isn't ignoring what's happening—she's saying there's another story to tell about what humans are capable of. The fable, the shared dream, that's as real as the crisis.
But isn't there a risk that celebrating human potential feels naive? Tone-deaf?
Only if you think celebration means denial. She's not saying the wars aren't happening. She's saying: look at what eight dancers from completely different traditions can do when they trust each other. That's not naive. That's evidence.
The piece uses eight dancers from different backgrounds. Why is that diversity crucial to what she's trying to say?
Because homogeneity is easy. You can make a collective by erasing difference. What's hard—what's actually interesting—is making something whole where everyone stays themselves. That's the real fable: that we don't have to become the same to move together.
The music is split between electric rock and delicate atmosphere. What's that doing?
It's the two things at once. The individual voice and the collective voice. They're not fighting—they're both playing. That's the whole point.
So this isn't really about dance at all.
It's entirely about dance. But dance is about bodies, and bodies are about how we live together. That's always been the real subject.