TEATRO LINEA DE SOMBRA (MEXICO)
Live performance on Friday night and workshop on Saturday
About the Company
TLS is an internationally renowned performance collective founded in 1993 in Mexico City. It is composed of visual artists, musicians, actors, film makers and scholars. Their work is characterised by deep social engagement and meticulous research in their development of documentary performances about sensitive topics like immigration, drug-related violence and human rights. In 2016, TLS worked together with students and residents of drug-infested popular neighbourhoods in Xalapa (Veracruz) on an impressive project called El Puro Lugar [‘The Pure Place’]. They excavated objects and stories and presented them in small-scale, delicately shaped intimate site-specific performances to a limited audience.
About Amarillo
At the moment, TLS is touring its production Amarilloaround the world. Its subject matter is the caravan of Central American migrants who try to reach the wall on the border between the USA and Mexico.
“A man has left his village and no one has heard from him since. The city of Amarillo in Texas was his destination, but he never arrived there. A woman in the distance reconstructs his body, his identity, his probable journey and by doing so performs his story and uncovers the emotional traces of his tale. That man and that woman have many faces, hundreds of thousands of identities that together amount to the image of a people launching itself in an endless exodus. Amarillo [Spanish for the colour yellow] is a destination that cannot be reached. It is also the intense colour and the extreme cruelty of the desert sun.”
Amarillois a documentary theatre production that explores the concept of cultural identity, the relation between real and virtual, between documentary and fiction. It is process, laboratory and performance in one. Performers construct an installation in full view of the audience, they improvise with objects, create landscapes and stories while they interweave visual art and physical acting. An old singer underscores their performance with an eerie soundscape, an ur-sound of human existence. An immense wall upstage forms the horizon. It symbolises what Mexicans call ‘The Wall of Shame’; the disputed border between Mexico and the USA. The numbers of people trying to climb over it increase every day, as does the violence perpetrated against them.
Info: http://fronteraarts.com/teatro-linea-de-sombra