The sea (of Vigo), that carries away and brings back the lover, the friend, gives life and movement to sem mim (without me). The ballet is rocked and soothed by the original score composed by Carlos Núñez, of Vigo, and José Miguel Wisnik, of Brazil, and based on the only set of pieces from the medieval Galician-Portuguese secular songbook that has come down to us with its scores intact: the celebrated “sea of Vigo song cycle” by Martín Codax. In the seven songs, dating from the 13th century, the poet always expresses the voice of the woman, or, more specifically, the voice of maidens in love that weep the absence or celebrate the imminent return of the lover-friend. Anxious to be reunited, they confide at times in the sea, at times in the mother, at times in friends. And, to appease or excite their desire, they go bathing in the waves of the sea of Vigo.
The lyrics of this medieval troubadour lead Rodrigo Pederneiras to mark his moving score with the interchange between calm and fury and with the ebb and flow of the waves and also to (re)produce, in the posturing on stage, the separation between feminine and masculine, where one always complains of the absence of the other, in choreography portraying the constant flux of advances and retreats and the recurrence of sinuous or abrupt movements of the torso.
From the combination of a geometric shape (an enormous, empty aluminum square) with an organic shape (meters and meters of a synthetic fabric made to provide shade for crops), both of which can be manipulated vertically, Paulo Pederneiras constructs a metamorphic set that transfigures during the show to represent different landscapes and elements: sea, mountains, clouds, boat, fishing net, dawn.
On finely knit unitards, dyed to match the skin color of each dancer, Freusa Zechmeister applies inscriptions and textures based on ornaments from the Middle Ages, transforming the dancers’ bodies into media conveying all the symbology of the era, and creating the illusion that the scene is populated by men and women “au naturel”, whose “nudity” is only covered by one of the most archaic signs of maritime imagination: the tattoo.

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