NSL

RETAMA

Retama is a stage work developed through the buffoon style, set on a ruined island where four performers attempt to reconstruct a machine from the remnants of a collapsed past. The buffoon is not used as characterisation, but as a performative methodology rooted in distortion, physical excess, rhythm, and contradiction. Through this approach, the work investigates the persistence of historical patterns: the recurrence of violence across territories, the transformation of power structures, and the reappearance of forms of domination under changing conditions. The island functions as a layered field of memory in which material debris and historical trace are indistinguishable.

The buffoon, grounded in medieval popular theatre and further developed through the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq, constitutes the central scenic tool of the piece. It enables a mode of perception based on displacement rather than representation, where meaning emerges through physical tension, failure, and heightened presence. The title Retama refers to a plant that grows in arid and hostile environments. Its capacity to persist in conditions of scarcity is understood as a non-heroic form of resilience, marked by continuity and repetition. Within the work, this figure operates as a conceptual reference to human persistence across historical rupture, and to the ways in which cycles of transformation often retain underlying structures. Rather than resolving these tensions, Retama establishes a performative framework in which they remain active. Meaning is approached as a process of circulation rather than conclusion, and the central machine remains an unresolved structure of desire, projection, and interpretation.

The performers develop the buffoon through sustained physical, vocal, and relational training, with an emphasis on precision, sensitivity, and compositional awareness. The work is based on a physical practice in which movement functions as a site of articulation rather than illustration, operating through shifts in weight, rhythm, and proximity. Within this embodied framework, laughter and rupture function as structural principles. The buffoon appears as a destabilising presence that exposes systemic fragility while remaining embedded within it.
Ultimately, Retama proposes a performative field in which meaning is not fixed but continually negotiated. It invites a mode of reception grounded in attention and uncertainty, where repetition is perceived but not resolved, and where historical return remains open and uncontained.

Language: English

Duration: 120 minutes, including a break

Tickets: Sliding-scale pricing: €13 / €16 / €20 (choose according to your financial means), plus advance booking fee.