Margarita Zafrilla Olayo’s TiLTING VERTICALITIES extents the language of choreographic practices drawn from the artist’s lived experience as a dancer; an spatial meditation in direct relation to others, like in dancing, liberating a pre-linguistic form of knowledge.

Moving collaboratively the work redefines the unifying act of peaceful engagement through touch.  

Zafrilla Olayo has produced a body of large-scale sculptural pieces* painted with organic forms for the public to inhabit. Caring and holding each, the dance offers new perspectives to bring one's equilibrium into balance.

 A work conceived as a collaboration, extending the balancing forces in one’s own body, counterbalancing with others, moving and being moved together and simultaneously, as well as in relationship with the choreographies and architecture of each given space.

Each loop sculpture is the documentation of the performance and becomes an object of the experience that resonates into the future.

Within this immersive interaction as moving sculpture and choreographic object, a group of local dance artists develop the proposal in which the audience are invited to participate and/or witness the action.

For those who may like to take part actively, it involves a simple movement ‘score’, or instruction, in which to experiment within an artwork and large loop of stretched fabric with another person. Holding together and supported by the artwork and fabric, the experience becomes a communication through movement itself – how to stand while keeping in touch with the ground, how to balance and rebalancing together and how to play with structural tension, inclinations and orientations, moving and being moved in direct relation to each other and sharing ground. 

For those watching, the work offers culptural and poignant images, as the participants negotiate interdependence, harmony, affect and anchoring. 

Beyond this immersive participatory experience, performance, dance, painting and sculpture, TiLTING VERTICALITIES invites us to re-animate and sustain dances, rituals and dimensions of being and sharing space.

TiLTING VERTICALITIES public performance was premiered alongside the Venice Biennial 2019 by invitation of James Putnam, independent curator, writer and former founder curator of the British Museum’s Contemporary Arts and Cultures Programme.

For bookings for cultural public programmes, research and educational contexts, groups and individual workshop sessions,
please email:

margazaol@gmail.com