The Laboratorio de Artes Vivas Tenerife LAV [Live Arts Lab] welcomes two resident artists, Óscar Cornago and Juan Navarro. For a week, both creators will work on the piece Se alquila at Teatro Leal’s  Sala de Cámara. The year’s first residency will be showcased next Monday, 27th January at 11:00 am in the Biblioteca Municipal de La Laguna. Admission is free.

Cornago and Navarro landed on the island yesterday to continue working on Se alquila. Archivo universal del actor, a long-standing project created and directed by both of them. A pilot was presented in March 2019 at the Théâtre de la Vignette in Montpellier, as part of a seminar about actors. They will continue their work with the support of this residency at Auditorio de Tenerife.

The opening of this process is special because it is shared with Metamorfosis, theatrical research and mental health group of the Sociedad Insular para la Promoción de las Personas con Discapacidad (Sinpromi) [Island Society for the Promotion of People with Disabilities], although it is open to anyone who wishes to learn about the process of this project.

The starting point of the work is the idea of an impossible conversation between a head and a body, between the world of ideas and the world of action, between the subject of a talk and the purpose of that talk; a conversation suspended in an improvised place between the past and the future.

Juan Navarro’s memory as an actor, performer, stage creator and theatre director, who has been involved in some of the most innovating contexts in the history of European theatre for more than thirty years, is the central point of this uncertain space of impossible conversations. The result is a performative talk or a performance that is displayed through a dialogue of open reflection.

The failure inscribed in modernity forces you to be constantly rethinking the boundaries between words and actions, past and present. Memory is updated to ask about the fact of getting together to remember; what is the meaning of bringing an action and a theatrical story out of its context, something that is only in the personal memory of those who performed it and, as collective memory, of some stage media. The past is full of black holes. But it is these very holes that actually turn history into live territory and the past into a potential future.