Agente Libre

To choose and to take on consequences with responsibility and enjoyment. Saving that right for us is a legacy of our particular way to call ourselves. Agente Libre; free agent, in english. That not only alludes to liberty as a human condition but also to a defenseless feeling created by unknown situations.

Gathering ourselves in a dance company with such a name means taking the floor -the body, to be more specific- and sharing this intimate and personal way to observe and understand things. Agente Libre is our pretext to celebrate that we are alive; assuming that through passion, art and pleasure, life becomes transcendental and, despite adversity, it deserves to be lived.

Veneration of senses. The joy of our achievements, no matter how small, also reached through pain. The conjunction of movements and experiences accumulated in memory that provides us a new result through our heritage. It is our dance turned into a parable of human spirit, with its virtues and miseries, and also  with the need for braking the walls of sensible experience to change it into beauty and imagination. Understood like this, dance is our life and life is the unique  possible wonder.

Agente Libre is a contemporary dance company that began its activity in 1999, under the artistic directorship of Felix Oropeza. Its goals are top develop integral projects in dance training and composing, focused on strengthening human potentials and constructing a new citizen through research and creation works based on the Venezuelan social and cultural reality. The diffusion of such creative work makes an emphasis in “non conventional” public places, in local, national and international contexts, to establish direct communication and fresh dialog with people.

Multiple dance trends, as well as other artistic disciplines, and the interpretation of our cultural heritage through the codes extracted from our daily reality, guide the line of work and creation in our company.

Oswaldo Marchionda

Felix Oropeza. Artistic director

Venezuelan dancer, professor and choreographer, he studied Contemporary Dance with masters and mistresses like Carlos Orta, Clover Roope, Risa Steimberg, Jeremy Nelson, Luis Viana, Luz Urdaneta, Jose Ledezma, Julia Sasso and David Earl. He has also studied extensively Popular Traditional Venezuelan Dance.

He has performed in Latin America and Europe as a member of Danzahoy and Agente Libre, two of the most recognized contemporary dance companies from his country. He has worked with other dance companies such as Taller de Danza Caracas, Rajatabla Danza, Coreoarte, Neodanza (all from Venezuela), and Transit (Spain), Kaeja  D´Dance and DanceFront (from Canada), among others.

His choreographies have been performed in Dance for a Small Stage, Ffida Off Site, Under the Umbrella Festival, 8:08 Series, Art Week (all from Canada), USA International Competition, Festival de Jovenes Coreografos (Venezuela), XX Contest of Contemporary Choreographic Composition (Mexico), XVI Jose Limon Dance Festival (Mexico), 8th Biannual Contemporary Dance Meeting  (Mexico), Un Desierto para la Danza 2000 (Mexico), Cuerpos en Transito 2000 (Mexico) and Festival Internacional de Teatro de Caracas. He has created Rumores Calidos and Soledades in association with MYTH production.

As a dancer, Oropeza has been a guest in several masterpieces, invited by Leari McNicoolls, Julia Sasso, Sonya Biernath, Allen Kaeja, Perter Chin, Livia Daza-Paris, Newton Moraes, Peter Chin, Jose Ledezma, Luz Urdaneta, Maria Rovira, Victor Manuel Ruiz, Grihska Holguin and Jacques Broquet, as well as to perform in the films Hunter Memories by Alejandro Ronceria and DanceFront by Downing.

In 1997, he got a national awards as The Best Contemporary Dancer and The Municipal Awards of Dance for the Best Choreography Nocturno Cero, in 1998.

Since its foundation, in 1999, Agente Libre has established itself as an innovative force on the Venezuelan dance scene. As its founder, Felix Oropeza has drawn on his vast experience as independent choreographer and professional performer, to consistently present a high standard of original creative work.

Critiques

“Nocturno Cero, by Felix Oropeza, is inspired on Mario Benedetti’s poetry with Rene Aubry’s music; it is a dance full of passion and despair; a well done masterpiece, a despaired verse. The human beings are living a vertiginous period and do not have time to discover themselves. We are hurried to arrive, we attack, we become violent, and we can find this aggression and violence in Oropeza’s work, but at the same time it can also bring to us the hope to find ourselves and to exchange the warm and kindness which the human being is now requiring”.

Simon Escalona/Hispano/Toronto/Canada/February 1995.

“Marked by a surrealistic shine, maybe coming from the creator subconscious and by the non pure white lighting and by the texture given for the water that interrupts the stage without any interference in the dancers trance, which becomes, at the end, one of the most charming work of contemplation”.

Rosa Maria Rappa/El Globo/September, 1997.

“The dancer Felix Oropeza surprised the audience with his choreography  Ausencia, with original music by Oswaldo Rodriguez. A typical urban character, killed by the suffocating and violent spaces where he moves. No way to get out. His movements evoke street dancing. An ordinary walking man, going day by day beyond the limits. As a transgressor, he dances his incapacity to communicate. Rigorous choreography, strong structure, sincere staging. Oropeza shows an evolution as a performer. In his body lives a freedom that belongs to him”.

Carlos Paolillo/ El Nacional/ May 1998.

“At the end, the link in the duet made the piece the most fascinating in the dance program, Nocturno Cero. Under the light, a pair of bodies are surrounded by two enormous orchids; one more time the magnificent flower copulation that ends under the rain of a selvatic orgasm. Everything was intense and the minimalist music of Aubry, with his involving decadence, reinforced the performing of delirium that Felix Oropeza gave birth to”.

Carlos Ocampo/Zona de Danza/Mexico/November 1998.

“Falsas Maniobras, from Felix Oropeza, shook the stage showing a dancistic tendency in which the creator mixes -as several artists do in different places around the world- the acrobatic dancing combined with slow movements which revealed the inner human inside the dancers.

Oropeza’s dancing is a discourse that shows the technical capacity of the dancers  like athletes of the muscles, along with loneliness, isolation and pain feelings”. Cesar Delgado Martinez/Diario Milenio/Mexico/May 2000.

“Serifotes is an exercise of virtuosity; light guides everything and the actions integrate and evolve from the minuscule particles of light that isolate the bodies and put them together beyond their own decisions. The characters are literally the intermediaries of the divine and, at the same time, its emanations. If the vertigo of the movement of Oropeza can convince, the integral concept of the spectacle reinforces him even more.

Rosario Manzanos/ El Proceso/ Mexico/ December 2001.