Alvaro García de Zúñiga's plays don’t have characters. His theatre is constructed by the actors who, using theatrical convention, interpret his texts and create a stage ready for a multiplicity of interpretations within which anything is possible. His works are, therefore, a variable geometry because they can be represented by one person or by many.
The plays:
Le Théâtre n'est que du Cinéma | Theatre is nothing but cinema…
Musical theatre, polyphonic, broadway boogie woogie. In the Scene/Seine and the Marne is a “how (do) we say musical”, as the author maliciously says. Forced to be isolated in the Scene/Seine, the actors are fed up (Marne), sinking, they lose the North.
_ reading concert by Jean Pierre Robert (double bass) and Alinea B. Issilva, Festival Musica Viva 1999 Lisbonne
_ polyphonic lecture by Dominique Parent and Arnaud Churin, Institute Franco-Portugais de Lisbonne, May 2003
_ polyphonic lecture by Dominique Parent and Arnaud Churin, Word Marathon, Toulouse, May 2005
Theatre Impossible | Impossible Theater
Lamentably – alas and alak – after months and months of writing, rehearsals, re-writings, discussions and serious discussions about the content of the piece Theatre Impossible - and also the question of whether or not it has any (contents), that it may not be entirely obvious - the team/cast arrived at the conclusion that it is absolutely impossible to mount “Theatre Impossible” as forseen.
This impossibility, paradoxically, more than a pebble in the shoe, fits like a glove, or better said with the rhetoric of the tongue, unpredictably permits us to present, on the dates (fruit) foretold, a shoe, a hand and a tongue. It is already that.
- With Leopold von Verschuer created at ACARTE, Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, November 1998
Lecture d'un texte pour le théâtre | Reading of a text for the Theatre
A written text is given to a reader to read. The text tells the story of a written text that is given to a readess to read. The readess enters into all her states as she reads that the text tells of all her states. All this is red, because the principle is very simple: she reads/beds it/him.
We have, therefore, a she, a he and a text/bed. Of which all the history of theatre is made, or should I say the world ???
Reading by Maria de Medeiros and William Nadylam, Gulbenkian Cultural Centre, Paris, 20th January 2007
Conférence de Presse | Press Conference
All press conferences are but for giving knowledge of precise information on a precise subject. All that remains is to define what we understand/hear by “precise”, “subject”, “information”, “knowledge”, “to give” and “but”. Precisely: in which ‘but’ a known subject gives information?
A world war in radio days
A veritable (in)adaptation of one of the greatest classics of all time, for example of a personal “settling of accounts” (in the way of Hamlemachine by Heiner Muller), that incorporates a particular critical vision of the piece as well as transferring through other media a vision of what is not supposed to be seen: a spectacle of radio-theatre. Imagine to what point that would have pleased MacLuhan.
Pièce a Conviction | Piece of Conviction for soprano, saxophonist and jealous woman (wife?)
(M)oral play
“A long long time ago, before putting an end to her days by throwing herself into a sausage maker while singing the final aria of Madame Butterfly backwards, the greatest diva of the Milan Kabuki Theatre, soprano Yo-Tampoko No-era, knew a man…”
- concert-reading by Yumi Nara, Daniel Kienty and Reina Portuondo, Festival Nova Musica, December 2004
Exercices de Frustration | Exercises in Frustration
While leaving a plastic installation and passing by the cinema, we arrive at the theatre to pose a pile/heap/bunch of questions: Why does a surveillance camera transmit its images to a childs bedroom? Who put the television in a cinema? What’s the link between a voyage to Remscheid and Pina Bausch? Why does a documentary voiceover tell you of the last row? Who was the man in the hotel corridor? His ancestors in Argentina from the time of the dictator, were they really Swiss? Why does Pina Bausch accept to dance with you? But does she play football? How many years later can a spectator help her brother to prepare for his suicide now? From where comes the language inextricably sinuous/serpentine of the Romanian Jewish emigrant Gherasim Luca and what misguided soul/madperson/idiot thought they could translate it? Can there be a poetic of failure? Where is a/the labyrinth?
- Created at the Theatre am Neumarkt, Zurich, January/February 2006