THEATRE REVIEW, El Mercurio, www.emol.com, August 5th, 2012

XIBALBÁ, Intense and Shocking Pedro Labra Herrera This is Natalia Cuéllar third remarkable work in the difficult and strange butoh art. "Xibalbá" has a very simple plot: a maiden makes a sacrificial pilgrimage to the underworld, a dark place of sickness and death according to the Mayan mythology, unknown and dangerous, harmful and disturbing, in which she will have to face her own contradictions. However, this is only the guiding thread of the sensory and deep ritual that invites us, an esoteric and fundamental journey on a level beyond ours of altered conscience, capable of causing something like a sacred terror in any who permits to be taken by it. Closest to "Xipetotec" in 2004, in comparison to the most recent -and also commendable-, "Cuerpo quebrado" (2008), in this play, Cuéllar, who created it, directed it and performs it, reveals her rigorous control of that unclassifiable expression which is the “butoh”, risen in Japan after Nagasaki and Hiroshima, meaning "dance of death" or "into the shadows", but tends to be around the concept of theatre performance in The West society. It relies on tense and convulsed movements, impossible shiverings and torsions, off the axis and on the edge of losing balance, based on the expressionist distortion and the extreme exacerbation, completely opposite to the stylization of the dance itself. As part of this, the officiant is presented as a possessed, in state of trance person, in a similar way of a grotesque and disarticulated doll coming from a ghostly world or a nightmare. On this occasion, it introduces for the first time the explicitly sexual factor, suggesting the Eros and Thanatos connection, and in a body display her shoulder blades manage to achieve their own life. The second performer, Aníbal Sandoval, makes a significant contribution in which he appears as a Xibalbá guardian or guide through this descent or immersion to the abysses; he emits guttural sounds and he plays the “didjeridú” on stage too, millenary aerophone from the Australian Aborigines, whose deep and original vibration joins the recorded music to create the impressive, shocking, magical and ancient atmosphere. The lights, the wardrobe and makeup, and the textures on stage (mud, dirt), complete the suggestive set of stimuli. It lasts only 45 minutes, but it is very intense.