Lola Lasurt: Ensayo para Deep Song (fragmento del friso nº1), 2024

This multiple edition for Concreta is a high-resolution scanned fragment of Lola Lasurt’s Ensayo para Deep Song (Rehearsal for Deep Song) frieze no. 1. The frieze, consisting of eight oil on canvas pictorial strips measuring 25 cm x 10 m, is translated here into a partial digital reproduction at a scale of 1:1, which preserves the physicality of the original piece and offers an accessible interpretation.

The work is inspired by the choreography Deep Song, which Martha Graham presented in December 1937 at the now defunct Guild Theatre in New York. This choreography responded to the still and moving images of terror and suffering that reached the American public through magazines and newsreels about the Spanish Civil War. The title of the choreography was a reference to Federico García Lorca’s Poema del Cante Jondo (1931). It was a short dance, approximately five minutes long, conceived in the same year that Pablo Picasso painted Guernica.

Ensayo para Deep Song by Lasurt was presented for the first time at the Centro Federico García Lorca in Granada in 2022, as part of the centenary of the Cante Jondo Contest organised in the same city in 1922. The publication was edited by Concreta and can be found here. This work explores the connection between modern dance, historical memory and universal suffering, transforming the performative gesture into a pictorial act and linking events of the past with contemporary political contexts.