telondefondo. Revista de Teoría y Crítica Teatral

Presentation of: "Processes of creation and scenic communication: intermediality, immersion and interactivity"

Jara Martínez Valderas — 2024-11-04

Performance Workshops, Liminal Scenes: My Emancipation as a Facilitator

Elena Sánchez-Vizcaíno Flys — 2024-11-04

For several years, I have worked with the concepts of performance and co-creation workshops (Walmsley, 2013) as social spaces for discussion and exchange (Lubicz-Nawrocka, 2019; Matarasso, 2019). Through observation, focus groups, and collaborative summaries, I have studied the interactions between participants as performance co-creators and my emancipation as director and facilitator. In this study, I reflect on power relations among participants; the relationship with space and the breaking of the “Italian-style theater” model of the 19th century; the immersive and experimental nature of artistic creation of a performative installation project whose outcome is unknown to everyone; and the use of technological and individual elements for the construction of space and atmospheres. I conclude that these liminal performance workshops, caught between workshop and performance, become political spaces where participants explore empathy, inclusion, resilience, and creativity.

The Case for Immersion: Punchdrunk, a Company Committed to Transformative Uses of Space, Closes the Gap Between Audience and Spectacle in "Sleep No More"

Monica Florensa Tomasi — 2024-11-04

This paper examines the spatial structures employed by the theater company Punchdrunk in Sleep No More. These structures are pivotal to a distinctive theatrical experience that blurs the boundaries between space, performer, and spectator: their relationship to one another becomes dynamic and constantly in flux. In the company’s productions, the audience is afforded the autonomy to choose what they wish to see and where they wish to go. This freedom of choice enables the company to assert that each audience member’s journey is unique, and that each performance is distinct. Along with an analysis of Sleep No More, this article offers a concise overview of the history of immersive theater, as well as a brief description of the neurological processes involved in the reception of similar immersive productions. Ultimately, the article makes the case for how immersive shows achieve a greater transformative character than conventional theater.

Real Games: Analysis and Method for Creating Interactive Dance in Domestic Contexts

Nicoletta Cappello — 2024-11-04

This essay is part of an artistic research project and a performance piece called Real Games: Performance Games for Everyday Life (2023), an interactive dance podcast, presented and archived on Radio Relativa, Madrid. The study adopts parallel theory, phenomenology, and performative writing in order to shed light on the methods used in the process of creating the piece in the context of the intermedial scene. The study pays special attention to imagination as a kinesthetic phenomenon and the role of physical perception in the participants’ experience of the Real Games. To conclude, the study provides a performance of its own: an event score for creating interactive dance scores for everyday environments.

Aesthetic and Dramaturgical Analysis of the Stage Language of the Granada-Based Company Mitra Teatro

Markel Hernández — 2024-11-04

Since its foundation in 2018, the Granada-based theater company Mitra Teatro has produced six shows that introduce audiences to classical sources of inspiration through contemporary and experimental theater. The following article proposes a study of the six shows in the company’s trajectory to date, with special emphasis on its three main and most representative productions: Panteros (2021), Mutated Bodies from Ovid's Metamorphoses (2022), and (re)Tales of the Alhambra (2023). In particular, the article distills the key aesthetic and dramaturgical markers of the company: ritual, narrative, fragmentation, audience interaction, theatrical eclecticism, masks, puppetry and object theater, humor, music, and dance. The article highlights the creative work of the company and their place in Spain’s peripheral and emerging theatrical landscape, with the aim of shedding light on Granada, a region with a theatrical fabric demanding greater attention.

"1980 Onwards": An Attempt to Stage the Selfie of a Generation

Tiran Manucharyan — 2024-11-04

This article analyzes the 2012 production of the Egyptian play 1980 Onwards (1980 wa-anta tali’) and contends it stages Syrian playwright Sa’dallah Wannous’s allusion to an imaginary mirror placed on stage. The play explores one of the most common phenomena of our everyday spurred by technological progress—selfies—and ends when the cast takes an actual self-portrait. Before concluding each performance, cast members of the 2012 production took collective selfies that included the spectators and shared them on social media accounts associated with the show. This article examines how these selfies, while being instrumental in promoting the show among young millennial audiences, were also meaningful for the show itself. It suggests that the selfies strengthened the sense that the stage reflected the experiences of those in the auditorium. Furthermore, it argues that by doing so, these selfies amplified “the scream of a generation”—an expression used by playwright Mahmoud Gamal Hedeny and director Mohamed Gabr to describe their production. Thus, the selfies allowed the play’s effect to be felt beyond the theater, turning the show into a social media phenomenon.

Classroom-Theater: New Contemporary Didactics for the Production of Scenic-Educational Events

Rigoberto Ordoñez-Matute — 2024-11-04

This article rethinks the artistic-aesthetic practices of contemporary scenic languages and introduces a didactic-artistic device called Classroom-Theater. As an interface between the Scenic Event and the Educational Event, the Classroom-Theater fractures borders between the classroom and the theater by integrating conventions, methodologies, and scenic/pedagogical languages. This didactic-artistic device is applicable to all levels of secondary education. By investigating the performing arts alongside pedagogy, the scenic-educational phenomenon reconfigures the processes, functions, and applications of the stage and the classroom as well as its contexts, practices, and agents. The integration of disciplinary boundaries, states, and resources transforms the following: (1) the role of the teacher-artist and the student-spectator (receiver); (2) the format, context, and atmosphere of the classroom-theater (spatiality and environment); (3) languages, codes, techniques, strategies, and didactic-artistic resources; (4) the artistic-aesthetic discourse vs. the curricular content; and (5) the dramaturgy of the play and structure of the pedagogical encounter. Ultimately, this device allows teachers, students, and artists to research, experiment, and generate knowledge from curricular and non-curricular content, transforming educational spaces, resources, and didactics by using artistic aesthetics, languages, and canons.

A Fourth-Rate Collector: A Critical Analysis of the Character of Lupus in "El centrofoward murió al amanecer" by Agustín Cuzzani

Gastón Amorin Alsina — 2024-11-04

The collector obsesses over objects, over their most relevant information, over the extravagance of his cataloging system. Although there may be a great variety of ways of collecting (and certainly of objects to collect), the common denominator of this activity is its confrontation with absence and the desire that makes collections always incomplete. At the same time, the very characteristic of the collectible object limits its use, generating a magical aura around it that, when desecrated, loses its properties. This paper is a critical analysis of the character of Lupus in the play El centrofoward murió al amanecer written by Agustín Cuzzani in 1955. In particular, the analysis engages with the work of Walter Benjamin and contemporary thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben and Beatriz Sarlo.

Hacedores de cultura. La huella de Don Quijote en la tierra de Martín Fierro. Volumen 12.

Mariano Nicolás Saba — 2024-11-04

Reseña del libro Hacedores de cultura. La huella de Don Quijote en la tierra de Martín Fierro. Volumen 12, de M. N Koss (Luz Fernández Ediciones, 2024).