Estances (Rooms) is a performed installation that arose out of the documentary video material and working diaries of different versions of the dance piece Solo per a habitació d’hotel (Solo Hotel Room) during its run from 1989, when it premiered at the Hotel Subur in Sitges, in the fetival S.T.I. Sitges Teatre Internacional, and on into the latest version, created in December 2000, at the Hotel Yokohama in Yokohama, Japan.

Estances is in part a memory of this nomadic and ephemeral dance-installation, conceived as a way of bringing viewers into the representational space where, as a kind of accidental voyeur of a scene that occurs inside a hotel room, showing the intimacy of a personage who is trapped in the silence of her own thoughts, her movements, her period of waiting, her very solitude.

Estances, however, transcends the idea of the room to become all hotel rooms. It enters into the distances between the interior space of hotels and the urban setting where they are to be found. We travel through the hotels, the rooms, and the views from the windows of different cities where the piece has been performed. We discover the homogeneity of these standard spaces that make up what we call hotels, in what we call cities, contrasted only by the character of their inhabitants.

Estances takes place in a time continuum where different sequences of video, dance, or actions of different durations are repeated. There is no determined beginning or end, but the visitors decide how long and where they will direct their gaze.

Estances is a coproduction of Àngels Margarit/cia. MUDANCES, Núria Font and STI creació contemporània 2003

Place and date of the premiere

STI creació contemporània 2003 Edifici Miramar, Sitges (Spain) 31th May 2003

La danza de Àngels Margarit consigue abrir las ventanas del Festival de Teatre de Sitges. “Estances” de la directora de la compañía Mudances, mejor propuesta del certamen. Una maravilla que establece su núcleo expresivo en el espacio más universal, por uniforme y habitado, que existe: la habitación de hotel. Gran precisión del uso del formato que usa en cada momento… ha dado con una veta desde donde expresar lo que muy pocas veces uno puede.

Pablo Caruana, La Razón, Sitges, 2 June 2003

Tres sales per mostrar la seva idea de l’espai, la fragilitat de la intimitat i el doble tall de la solitud. (…) Margarit ha posat en pràctica un concepte de dansa que busca una nova relació entre el cos i el territori, entre el ballarí i l’espai.

Juan Carlos Olivares, Avui, Sitges, 2 June 2003