How is a work created? How is the artist’s imagination materialized on the scene? Each person seeks their methodology, their ways, their recipes, which are, in turn, constantly transformed by the experiences we go through. Ideas, imaginaries and inspirations are triggers that are taken to the “kitchen” of a new work, where research, teamwork, trial and error bring forth the material that is selected, polished and broken until the process is completed with the viewer’s gaze.
An arduous path of search, play, work, frustration and joy. In my case, as a creator, two factors play a fundamental role in this search game: the body in all its possibilities on stage and the job with technical resources that allow us to reach situations that are not possible outside the theater, in real life.
UOW is a company with which we have created shows for many years, together with Santiago Castello (technical director). It is a project that has allowed us to grow in our craft, train ourselves in our work, interact with specialists from different fields and acquire technical theatrical materials. In 2007, the desire to try new pulley systems and scenic flights led us to the beginning of a creative process. The fun and the game They took hold of us with the evolution of weightless situations, flights and jumps like those in oriental martial arts movies, which motivated us to continue testing ideas, sequences and other systems with new elements and possibilities.
Little by little, the desire to materialize this artisanal artistic-technical game in an exhibition took over me, which led me to other questions: how is a dramaturgy constructed with this material? How is a theatrical plot organized with what we are passionate about and amused by? In this case the inspiration was the work itself, the rehearsal, the desire to play with these elements similar to us in the world of theatrical technique and mountaineering. But as a theater student and acrobatmy artistic concerns at that time led me to have to justify everything with a plot line.
The process had the intermittency typical of an artistic project without funding, since it was interspersed with the job possibilities of directing shows for our production company UOW and the selection as an artist by a French choreographer that allowed me to continue growing and sharing stages abroad. with artists from different disciplines and places. But those intervals occupied by work projects, trips, obligations, etc., were an excuse to continue delving into a possible common thread.
In 2010, with the effort and work of many friends, we made the first sample of Vigils. The first edition of the Cultural Industries Market (MICA) made it easier for me to offer the material to a producer who saw it as novel, disruptive, just what he was looking for. In 2012, the premiere of the work took place at the opening of the Nuevo León International Festival (Monterrey, Mexico), those first sketches of scenes had to be transformed into solid and defined material to give us security in the face of the responsibility of an opening of that type, in a packed room of 1,200 spectators.
Then, the desire to show our work at home took us to the recently opened El Galpón de Guevara, where we did two seasons in a row (2014/2015), adding the circus director Mariano Pujal to accompany us to continue working on the material. And so, again between intervals, Vigils had his tours throughout the interior until his last performance in the Mercosur International Festival in Córdoba 2017. Since then, the desire to reformulate the dramaturgy of the work, to take the performance to a place that calls me more in the present, grew over the years, thinking that the work, in the same way that one, grows, changes, gets moving.
Vigils is a journey through uncapturable time and space. It raises questions about existence, dreams, loneliness, mental health; It combines technical resources with movement to challenge the planes of space, body and gravity, proposing magic in simplicity, using artisanal mechanisms and the physicality of the performer, creating a dream world that challenges the borders between reality and fiction.
Currently, June 2024, 17 years after those first aerial games; after time and experiences; jobs here and abroad; pandemic, sorrows and joys; In this difficult time for art and culture, for our craft, we choose again to play what we know how to doto give value to artisanal research, to reformulate material from before but with what moves us today, without losing its essence, once again jumping into the void of the scene, in the only way we know: as a team and with friends.
*Scenic artist, director, teacher. Director and performer of Vigils, which has performances on Sundays in June and July at 8 p.m. in El Galpón de Guevara (Guevara 326, CABA).
