THE WORCENTER OF
JERZY GROTOWSKI
AND
THOMAS RICHARDS
SIN FRONTERAS
"SIN FRONTERAS", adapted from the text “Beben” by Guillermo Calderón, takes place after the 2010 earthquake in Chile. A group of volunteers comes to help victims of the disaster. With a therapeutic purpose, they tell children affected by the catastrophe the story, «Earthquake in Chile,” written by Heinrich Von Kleist in 1807, in which a woman barely escapes her execution while an earthquake destroys the city of Santiago de Chile in 1647. Nevertheless, she is finally overcome by the tragedy when attacked by a desperate and furious mob.
"SIN FRONTERAS" opens a reflection on the cracks within a society that become apparent after a natural catastrophe, highlighting the precarious equilibrium of our daily lives. The spectator is transported from a realistic universe to a grotesque and comic one, both intimate and profound, in which the volunteers reevaluate their motivations and actions, as they struggle with inner conflicts that inhabit them when confronted with the suffering that any individual may have to live.
Collective creation
Directed by Thomas Richards
Assisted direction by Lynda Mebtouche, Cécile Richards and Jessica Losilla-Hébrail.
Actors:
Alonso Abarzúa Vallejos; Javier Cárcel Hidalgo-Saavedra; Gina Gutiérrez Villamizar; Guilherme Kirchheim; Lynda Mebtouche; Felipe Salazar; María Constanza Solarte and Juan David Salazar Montoya.
Link trailer: https:/vimeo.com/254669740
THE UNDERGROUND
In an extraordinary event that interweaves comedy, grotesque, song, and Dostoevsky’s words, the Workcenter gives a response to an underground of unlived wishes and desires. The piece is not a staging of Dostoevsky’s novel, yet its Hero, like the main character of the book, is someone that we strangely seem to know, a kind of “everyman.” He, like the other characters, also lives in a hidden territory, an underground where non-lived needs, actions, and reactions reside so close, yet as if out of reach. Together with Dostoevsky, we try to understand if it is possible to alter this situation that nature has seemingly installed and deviate from this habitual “impossibility,” to uncover a providence that exists within, yet which remains unlived.
Collective creation
Directed by Thomas Richards
Assisted direction by Lynda Mebtouche, Cécile Richards and Jessica Losilla-Hébrail.
Actors:
Alonso Abarzúa Vallejos; Javier Cárcel Hidalgo-Saavedra; Guilherme Kirchheim; Felipe Salazar; María Constanza Solarte; Thomas Richards; Jessica Losilla-Hébrail; Desiré Hinkson; Katie Mazzini.
Link teaser: https://youtu.be/g-ybIy2or6Y
SONGS OF TRADITION
This open work session allowed interested individuals to witness the work of Thomas Richards on songs of tradition with members of his Workcenter team. Practical work on songs of tradition was initiated at the Workcenter in 1986, and had a continual development over 35 years. Such sessions served the team members to help widen their knowledge of a “work on oneself” that can be carried out through a specific approach to song and action. In this sense, this worksession on songs of tradition is not a spectacle, it belongs to the domain of performing arts research known as Art as vehicle, wherein, as in certain old traditions, work on song and action goes together with an approach to the interiority of the human being and of its potentialities. These sessions of work become a means of awakening subtle aspects of inner experiencing, and a tool for the transformation of the artist’s perception and presence.
Doers: Thomas Richards, Cécile Berthe, Jessica Losilla-Hébrail, Lynda Mebtouche, Hyun Ju Baek, Alonso Abarzúa Vallejos, Felipe Salazar, Javier Cárcel Hidalgo-Saavedra, Desiré Graham, Guilherme Kirchheim, Katie Mazzini, María Constanza Solarte, Gina Gutiérrez Villamizar.