Colectivo Fango
| Director: | Camilo Vásquez |
| Starring: | Trigo Gómez, Rafuska Marks, Manuel Minaya, Rodrigo da Matta, Juan Miguel Alcarria, Danilo Moroni and Camilo Vásquez |
| Visual artist: | Danilo Moroni |
| Creative technician: | Juan Miguel Alcarria |
| Sound: | Rodrigo da Matta |
| Assistant director: | Aitana Sar |
“There is no politics that is not politics of the body”.Michel Foucault
A female actor, two male actors, an audiovisual creative team and a
director; some of the artists that are a part of Colectivo Fango decided to
create from the confines of their homes. L i m b o is a theatrical,
performative and audiovisual piece where the viewer is invited to follow
the creative process from within and to be a witness to the private spaces
of the artists. All that takes place becomes material for the project which
involves a investigation into: my body, my border?
L i m b o
places us on the border between the real world and the world of fantasy.
Fiction and reality coexist in a nebulous, strange space. But in times of
pandemics and lockdowns, what's “real”? What are the new walls that are
being built? Are we ready to bring down that which is established, to
deliberately mutate and “reveal ourselves” by means of creativity?
As the collective explains, “As with all working groups, when Covid-19
arrived, we were exiled from our rehearsal space, where we had been working
on a new creation LA ESPERA (The Wait), a project that focuses its
narrative on the promise of this future that is yet to arrive.
In lockdown, the first thing we did was to meet up in Hangouts, to see each
other, to talk, listen and make sure that we were all fine. From then on,
we took the decision to maintain our artist residency. Suddenly, our house
had become our creative space. The theme that we had been working on now
took on a newer meaning. Deskwork was more present than ever.
We exchanged and discussed articles, essays, films, poems, music. We shared
anecdotes, dreams, fears, desires. We rediscovered the first texts that had
emerged before the pandemic. We kept the lights on, and at the end of each
session, we raised a toast. Drama in lockdown.
The opening of the Confines initiative of the 38th Autumn Festival thus led
to the natural awakening of a proposal that had been unconsciously brewing
from the start of the lockdown. A proposal that fit our line of work and at
the same time, mobilised the conventional idea of creative production.
We have sought to share our creative process, not as a documentary archive
but by submerging ourselves in a process that questions the limits of
reality and fiction where it is hard to distinguish what is a part of our
daily lives and what is a part of artistic experience. We let ourselves be
ambiguous, playful, flexible, honest, unfaithful.
Lying about absolute truths, being guilty of brutal honesty with barefaced
lies. Who can distinguish what’s real and what isn't? From this
perspective, we seek to tell the story of a creation: the creation of a
piece on what our locked down bodies have experienced. We asked ourselves,
how are these lockdown policies materialised and reflected in bodies,
spaces and times? From this point onwards, our performers (Manu, Rodrigo
and Rafuska) have developed their proposals.
Colectivo Fango's career began in 2016 in Madrid and is guided by a
continuous search for human and artistic identity.
The collective's first work was the play F.O.M.O. (Fear of Missing Out) which premiered at the Surge Madrid
Festival in 2017. The show was later included in the 2018 programme of the
National Drama Centre, apart being staged at several international
festivals such as the Be Festival in Birmingham (United Kingdom) in 2018 or
the LMDP Festival Internazionale di Teatro Arte e Nuove Tecnologie
(Sardinia, Italy) in 2017.
Additionally, as part of its creative labour, Colectivo Fango also conducts
theatre workshops imparted by the director Camilo Vásquez at the LMDP
Festival in Sardinia, the Laboratorio Rivas Cherif of the CDN in Madrid, at
La Térmica in Malaga, etc.
Colectivo Fango's second work was TRIBU (Tribe). Presented as a
work in progress in the Vivero Clásico section of the Festival Clásicos de
Alcalá in 2018, once it was completed, it premièred in the Sala Cuarta
Pared in May 2019.
In October 2019, the troupe began their research for their next showLA ESPERA. The idea for this new show was to close F.O.M.O. and TRIBU as the first two parts of a trilogy on
the search for identity through time. Currently, it is in the development
stage, with the support of an Ayudas a la Creación grant provided by the
Madrid City Council.
Simultaneously, the members of Fango who are participating in the Confines
initiative of the 38th Autumn Festival are Trigo Gómez, Rafuska Marks,
Manuel Minaya, Danilo Moroni and Camilo Vásquez.