Persecution, imprisonment, exile. From these lived experiences, Lleca Teatro have created a sensory landscape filled with their own memories. Memories of social struggle and political violence in Latin America. Memories that are not only of the past, but also of the present. Animating this landscape, Lleca Teatro have rebuilt the magically violent location of Macondo – the fictional place of Gabriel García Márquez 100 Years of Solitude – and locate it in George Orwell’s 1984. Both settings are analogies and metaphors for the violent political systems the collective have fled from, yet cannot leave behind. Engaging in their own modality of largely non-verbal storytelling, Lleca Teatro invite the audience into these landscapes of being and not-being.
Lleca Teatro is a theatre group from Nicaragua that are composed of, and make theatre with, people from communities “trapped” in unconventional spaces riddled by violence. (Lleca is een anagram of the Spanish word ‘calle’, meaning ‘street’.) For this reason, violence in its multiple forms as well as its undoing/contestation are the main issues that inform their work. Over the years of their work through and on imprisonment, they have developed a distinctly corporeal theatrical methodology that draws on the body as a creative source of imag(inari)es, text(ure)s and sensory experiences/experimentation. The collective had to flee Nicaragua following the violent repression of massive anti-government protests. Amid the pandemic restrictions in the Netherlands, Lleca Teatro began rebuilding and internationalizing their community arts collective. This collective is now composed of Nicaraguan refugees scattered across the Netherlands, as well as solidary artists and young students. Especially for ICAF 2023, the group have developed “Farewell Macondo” merging memories and experiences of absence experienced directly by the group (through imprisonment, exile and/or lockdown) with our continued struggle for social change.