Spain's Blanca Li: Choreographer, woman of all trades, dreamer

Blanca Li performs a scene from her two woman show called "Goddesses& Demonesses" during a dress rehearsal before opening night at the City Center in New York. [Photo/Agencies]

Blanca Li could not be busier: she is a dancer, film director and actress, and does choreography for stars like Beyonce and Daft Punk, and lots, lots more.

There's opera, ad campaigns for Prada and Christian Louboutin, video, art installations. Then, the 53-year-old Spaniard has this other, minor goal: make the world a better place through the performing arts.

"I am very, very inquisitive. I love to mix things. Everything inspires me. The more I see, the more I learn, the more inspiration I have," Li, who has lived in Paris since 1993, told AFP over the weekend.

"I would like to influence the world more. I want it to change, to improve," Li said minutes before taking to the stage of the New York City Center for the US opening of her dance performance, called Goddesses and Demonesses. It is an impassioned tribute to the power of women.

"Sometimes being an actress is a bit odd. You ask yourself a lot of questions about what you can do to improve the world you have around you and the people to whom you contribute something with your art," said Li, a diminutive, green-eyed native of Granada in Spain's Andalusia region.

As she spoke, an assistant attached a long braid to her dark hair and fixed it in a bun. During the show, it will come loose and spill down her back, but also fling upward, sideways and in every which direction, as if the hair, too, were dancing.