The Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque, space of the Area of Culture, Tourism, and Sport, will offer the following performances this month of May: Vagabundus, by the Mozambican Idio Chichava, Trabajos forzados, by the Barcelona-based company Ça Marche, and The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes, by the Australian collective Back To Back Theatre. There will be musical performances by Ruido Clavel and Raül Refree + Niño de Elche, the premiere of the movie Through The Graves The Wind Is Blowing, and the exhibition of photography and audiovisual Tiempo, sueño, olor, by the Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade, as well as mediation activities to complement the program.
Performing Arts
Ça Marche, Trabajos forzados (May 7)
The Barcelona company Ça Marche, founded in 2015, presents the world premiere of their new piece: Trabajos forzados at Condeduque. The show is a performance in Catalan sign language (LSC) and spoken Spanish that questions the dynamics of language and its relationship with the body, starting from the idea of silence, both chosen and imposed.
Back To Back Theatre, The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes (May 9 and 10)
At the last edition of the 2024 Venice Theatre Biennale, the Australian collective Back to Back Theatre was awarded the Golden Lion for their career. Founded in 1987 by a core group of artists who identify as neurodivergent with different abilities, Back Theatre is an emblem of Australian theater that has captivated audiences worldwide with works addressing social, political, and philosophical themes. The play they present, whose title could be translated as The shadow whose prey becomes a hunter, has a strong activist and denouncing content.
Idio Chichava, Vagabundus (May 21 and 22)
The Mozambican choreographer Idio Chichava believes that the essence of dancing and singing lies in a forgotten natural human condition. That’s why in Vagabundus, the performance for 13 unique dancer-singers he has put together with his company Converge+Dance, there are no costume designs, special effects, or lighting gimmicks, only 13 bodies singing and dancing. In his proposal, the emotional dimension takes over, achieved with those bodies that never stop moving to the rhythm of popular songs—both ancestral and new—that they themselves sing.
Music / Word
Ruido Clavel (May 23)
Ruido Clavel is a meeting point between two musicians: Helena Amado, voice and percussion, and Pedro Rojas Ogáyar, experimental guitarist, curated by the artist Pedro G. Romero, National Prize of Plastic Arts 2024. This restless group emerged in Seville at the end of 2023, where the project’s rehearsals began, and where both musicians presented their first sketches to Pedro.
Raül Refree + Niño de Elche (May 31)
Raül Refree + Niño de Elche present the world premiere of Cru+es at Condeduque, a proposal through paths that branch out and converge, stylistic lines that advance and intertwine, and a new world of possibilities that, on this occasion/celebration, embraces the observance and embrace of the creator Marta Pazos.
Art
Fuentesal Arenillas and Itziar Okariz, Carrusel (until May 18)
Fuentesal Arenillas and Itziar Okariz present Carrusel, an encounter between their sculptural and performative artistic practices expressly made for the Bóvedas Hall. Understanding conversation as an artifact, through a process of correspondence between the artists, the material-words translate into new figures that repeat, change the forms of the fabric, and extend through elements like a cane. From a place of agreement in the ways of occupying and perceiving space, the artists invite an ongoing encounter, where collars intersect with waists and fists with feet.
Andrea Canepa, Wasi Llamkha (Place and touch) (until May 18)
Wasi Llamkha (Place and touch) is an ephemeral architecture, a pavilion located in the South Patio of Condeduque that invites to close the eyes and feel, to recognize and relate outside the parameters of visual primacy. Its tones blend with the patio, to be discovered through body movement, touch, and sound. The artist Andrea Canepa has been inspired, on the one hand, by the forms of representation and information recording used in Peru in the pre-Columbian era, and, on the other hand, by the treatise Ars memorativa, a series of mnemonic principles and techniques associated very popular during the Renaissance and used to organize memory and remember large amounts of information, as a prototype of artificial memory.
Jonathas de Andrade, Tiempo, sueño, olor (From May 30)
Jonathas de Andrade will inaugurate his work of photography, video, and installation Tiempo, sueño, olor in the Bóvedas Hall. The works of the Brazilian artist are characterized by emerging from the activation of a collective. The artist proposes to a group of people to, from their own idiosyncrasy, carry out exercises that expand the contexts and realities in which these groups act. The bodies that are activated alongside Andrade’s look at each other, touch each other, listen to each other, and move. They are organisms with different skins, humans and animals, of diverse phenotypes. They are bodies that tense, but above all caress.
Film
Through The Graves The Wind Is Blowing (May 7)
The director of Through The Graves The Wind Is Blowing, Travis Wilkerson, a filmmaker whom Sight & Sound defined as the "political conscience of American cinema," once again shook us (and amused us) after the exceptional An Injury to One and Did You Wonder who Fred the Gun? with this collage, a blend of guerrilla documentary, film noir, and absurd comedy. Beneath this surface runs a chilling narrative about the survival of fascism in today’s Europe and a historical lesson on what the destruction of Yugoslavia can teach us.
Through The Graves The Wind Is Blowing won the jury award at the International Film Festival of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria with the Special Mention of the Jury.
Mediation
Mediation programming (until June 2025)
‘Espacio P.O.M’, ‘(Re) vuelta al patio’, and ‘Tú, yo, el mundo/ La colmena’ will be the three mediation activities for this month. ‘Espacio POM’ is a meeting point dedicated to the dance of the future; ‘(Re) vuelta al patio’ launches new proposals to inhabit Condeduque from the perspective of childhood; and ‘Tú, yo, el mundo/ La colmena’ is a laboratory of expanded performing arts for 9 to 11-year-olds. /
