Gracias totales
Gracias totales is a ritual of gratitude around a table. It is a staging that brings together texts, speeches, gestures, and movements around the simple act of giving thanks. A relational piece in which the ritual shares space with food, conversation, magic, and the exploration of a gesture or a word.
A group of people gathers around a table to remember and invoke artists, poets, singers, or actresses who knew how to express gratitude beautifully. They delve into unfamiliar languages—from Quechua to Icelandic to Japanese—seeking the contagious sonority of gratitude, its texture, its flavor, the scent it gives off, its subtly transformative power. And as they do so, something within them becomes better attuned, something akin to a healing.
At the same time, as they listen to themselves giving thanks and thanking one another, the performers begin to build a small altar at the center of the table, feeding it with family photos, books, necklaces, plants, shells, stones, talismans, etc.—a whole array of objects that make up the living offering of gratitude, its most faithful and tangible register—inviting others to do the same. Because, after all, we never give enough thanks, and gratitude has no expiration date.
Compañía La Soledad
Marc Caellas and Esteban Feune de Colombi founded La Soledad in Bogotá in 2011, an oxymoron they use to unite itinerant companies with their unavoidable solitudes.
For more than ten years they have developed amplified literature projects, theater, and performance pieces in which texts—poems, manifestos, songs, graffiti—are read and interpreted poetically and playfully, in friction and introspection with other disciplines, staging the color, the voice, the scent, and even the touch of writing(s).
In their stage works they explore the word in relation to the landscape and the local context where each piece is created, each of which generates its own device and leaves several traces: that of the premiered project itself, and another, subtler and more collective—perhaps even more enduring—which embraces the network of connections woven in the lead-up to the premiere, hybridizing disciplines and knowledge, platforms and languages, borrowings and exchanges.