“Alberto Cortés is a charming and diabolically intelligent chatterbox. There is a tangible love and generosity in his work that is far from pretentious, striking and simulated. There is also an infectious sweetness that is almost infantile, but that hides an iron fist in a velvet glove”.

Iara Solano, Festival inTACTO

Throughout his career, among many other things, Alberto Cortés has taught the Germans to (Sanctify the Parties), he has displayed the efforts of a Japanese trying to be a Flamenco dancer (Historia de Mikoto) and he has transformed the Malagan tradition of the verdiales into a war (Viva la guerra). Born in Malaga in 1983, this playwright, director and performer takes it with a lot of humour that his name seems like a melodramatic singer, and on his website comoseralbertocortes.com he warns about this. This sense of humour radiates in much of his work, in which the breaking down of the barriers of theatrical representation plays a fundamental part.

Cortés graduated in History of Art from the University of Malaga and he has always sought for a meeting point between the performing and visual arts. He was selected in one of the workshops at the Venice Biennale to work side by side the prestigious Belgium company Peeping Tom, and throughout his training he has also crossed paths with creators such as Rodrigo García, Roger Bernat, Daniel Abreu and Patricia Caballero, who have influenced his way of understanding the stage. Cortés started his adventures alongside actress Alessandra García in 2008- together they founded the company Bajotierra- and he was one of the founders of El Quirófano Alternative Theatre Festival and of the Escena Bruta project of short pieces, which have reinforced the cultural fabric of his home town of Malaga, were he currently also makes up part of the scenic mediation project Territorio Espansivo.

His most recent piece Masacre en Nebraska, has come out of his artistic residency at L’Estruch (Sabadell), the Leal Lav (Tenerife) and the Festival inTACTO (Vitoria-Gasteiz). This is a scenic remix mechanism which reflects on the end (or not) of “the stories” that are purposely created with a group of local viewers in each city Masacre en Nebraska talks of how to create a production from our accumulated waste as viewers. This narrates scenes as we do at the bar, and it reflects on them from what we saw and also what others have told us. The stage becomes a place to think of an imagined macro-piece, a collective remix created from our memories. From this fiction, the work comes close to being a shared imagination that “forward reminisces”. In the words of Alberto Cortés, “Masacre en Nebraska is a tool to get closer to local narratives and their stories; a local activation strategy based on that which remained. It could also be a corporal and oral narrative mechanism, a collective memory exercise, a reflection on the truth and lies of stories... a manipulation, at the end of the day”.

Practical information

• Teatros del Canal, Sala Negra
• 20 and 21 November, 8:30 pm

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