Theater / Places 2 years

TNC presents the ZIP Festival: five days of new scenic formats

From June 15 to 19, the National Theater of Catalonia presents the first edition of the ZIP Festival, five days in which the theater becomes a meeting point for new stage formats.

With ecology in all its forms as a common thread, the shows that will be part of this Festival will make us question our lifestyle, how we live with other species and what relationship we have with the universe.

Below, we tell you about the program, which will feature productions by Sociedad Doctor Alonso, Psirc, Elena Córdoba, Rosa Casado and Mike Brookes, Xesca Salvà and Marc Villanueva Mir, Laboratorio de Pensamiento Lúdico and Elisa Martínez & Co.

 

Hammamturgia

June 15 and 16 at 8 pm

Sociedad Doctor Alonso creates an interactive proposal, a journey to observe environmental conditions and explore our relationship with space.

Centered on the concept of “Hammam” as a container of an environment and a temperature, Hammamturgia captures the flow of bodies and proposes transformations to activate a choreographic work that dialogues with space and time. It explores a symbiotic relationship between creators, spectators, space and work to investigate how external conditions modify the relationships between bodies.

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After Everything

June 18 and 19 at 5 pm and at 8 pm

Psirc presents two of the four chapters of the saga After Everything, which explores marginality as a space full of potential and possibilities. Combining music and circus, the company addresses the fragile balance of global ecology and spiritual crisis.

An epic about the daily life of existences conceived from the margin. The unknown generates fear, but also fascination.

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On a clear day you can see forever

From June 15 to 19 at 6:30 pm

For five days, Rosa Casado, Mike Brookes and a group of collaborators will dismantle a second-hand car in all its parts, a meticulous action of separation and classification of the materials that constitute the vehicle to think about that which is residual and the material connectivity of distant places.

There will be five different performances, five episodes in which different perspectives and scales of relationship with the world will be proposed through this object.

  • Episode 1 (06/15): begins with the final journey of one of the estimated one billion cars currently on the world’s roads.
  • Episode 2 (06/16): we look up to observe the thin atmospheric layer that surrounds the planet and how the things that hang and circulate in it affect what we see.
  • Episode 3 (6/17): we imagine Humanity as a force of nature and think about the scale of geological processes and events comparable to this force.
  • Episode 4 (6/18): we track the dust that rises and settles with everything we do, debris that moves from place to place and that we cannot avoid.
  • Episode 5 (6/19): we pile up everything we could find a new use or purpose for, try to get rid of, and then look at what’s left.

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And we will look like trees. Botanical fictions.

June 17 and 18 at 8 pm

Elena Córdoba and her company imagine a future in which their dancers’ bodies turn green and become trees. This show combines dance, the study of anatomy and the projection of these plant realities augmented with the microscope to create fictitious unions between the body and the organizational forms of plants.

The human body is full of plant forms: arboreal neurons that join together to form forests, small electric trees from which our thoughts are born, ramifications of the nervous system that look like intricate roots.

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Savage thinking

From June 15 to 19 (schedules below)

A laboratory plate of gigantic dimensions. Hands full of microbes. And time. These are the three elements necessary to create the colony of fungi that we will see grow live in this piece by the creators Xesca Salvà and Marc Villanueva.

  • Ritual of inoculation (06/15 at 5 pm): a collective and festive meeting in which the company and the spectators will gather around a Petri dish of two meters in diameter to perform a ritual of inoculation. A conversation about the digestive singularities of fungi, their ability as decomposers and transformers of matter and the ecological significance of waste.
  • Growth period (June 16, 17 and 18): the plate will be kept in the Painting Workshop, in a semi-dark and silent environment, while the inoculated fungi and bacteria grow inside it. During this period the plate will be open to visitors free of charge.
  • Planetary exploration (06/19 at 12:30 pm, 5 pm and 7 pm): while we discover what has grown inside the Petri dish, a sound intervention with percussion and live electronic music will bring us closer to a dialogue between the sounds generated by the fungi and the parallelism with human colonization and urbanization.

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Game of Kin

From June 17 to 19 at 11 am

Game of Kin invites us to think about the life and death options of a series of hybrid beings, born from imagined kinships in a context of extreme environmental conditions.

A game in constant transformation that generates multiple narratives depending on the discussions, negotiations and agreements reached by the players in each game. A proposal that aims to change our way of thinking and sow the seed of a future where we can really survive.

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The Best or Nothing

Video installation in the lobby

To this day, the vehicle is understood as a symbol of masculinity and status. In this video installation, Elisa Martínez appropriates the formula “luxury car advertisement” and the Mercedes-Benz slogan “The Best or Nothing” to confront advertising and the increase in luxury car sales with junk cars, a new element of Barcelona’s urban landscape.

This piece is uncomfortable because it evidences our own dehumanization. When looking at a luxury car or a junk car, the person disappears, and we are only able to see the material that surrounds and represents them.