How to talk about miniscule everyday events from two sources of inspiration: literature and comic? About how to create theatre today for modern audiences from another two fine arts? On the one hand, in The Infra-ordinary, Georges Perec (1936-1982) asks readers to question everything that is ordinary. ‘The events that happen every day and return every day, the trivial, the quotidian, the obvious, common, ordinary, infra-ordinary, background noise, the humdrum… How do we notice and question these things? How can we describe them? By interrogating the everyday.’ The posthumous book (from 1989) is one of the starting points for the Catalan company ATRESBANDES in this unfolding of everyday and recognisable situations, a map of the common that invites viewers to discover the tragicness inhabiting all those things that go unnoticed.

On the other, the work by Chris Ware, an American comic book artist born in 1967 who is famous for his constant eagerness for experimentation. His graphic novel Building Stories is the other formal and thematic reference point on which the assembly of ATRESBANDES is supported. In the novel, Ware sketches a landscape of different scenes that occur around a protagonist, creating an effect of simultaneousness.

Everything that happens on stage does not occur immediately, it is not automatic, and the company wants to encourage the audience to practice something they have called ‘the patience of the voyeur’, an exercise that we’re probably forgetting, always drowning in mad rushing and our multiple daily tasks. But taking this time to look slowly, waiting for something exciting to occur, ignoring everything happening around you, could perhaps be used to reconstruct the meanings of actions and events, so that the true event surfaces in the dialogue between time and the gaze.