The ATRESBANDES Company will hold a technical residency in El Canal from March 20 to 24 to work on its new project entitled “DESERT“. The piece is one of the first co-productions of El Canal this year, made together with Teatre Lliure.
The work is based on the multiplicity of connotations of desert. The word hides a whole imagination behind it. Apart from its different grammatical values, it is a fundamental word in many religious and philosophical texts. For Hannah Arendt it is a metaphor for understanding the place of the human being in the world (the world is always a desert). In the Bible, it represents the place where faith in God is tested and Islam is a religion born from journeys in the desert in search of the divine presence. It is, in short, a word loaded with meanings, it is almost a symbol. But a symbol that contains a great paradox: we move away from it because it represents a space empty of life and at the same time we look for its void to be able to distinguish the signs that life does not let us see. This mixture of psychology, philosophy and mysticism is the starting point of this new company project.
Following their residency, ATRESBANDES will hold a three-hour stage creation workshop for professionals and students. The company will share practical tools for setting up stage devices, using concepts such as “displacing the conflict”, “sculpting in the memory” or “emptying the meaning”, all of which are taken from areas such as cinema or sculpture and applied to the live arts to thus generate new ways of approaching the stage event.
