A theatre to save the world

Abstract

Can theatre save the world? Will it manage to fracture the dominant narrative and the established order? How can a silent cartography be drawn for those that were defeated and left devoid of History? The work of Juan Mayorga is permanently reframing our questions and answers, our taken-for granted maps that have been drawn with a stern, univocal hand. In order to do so, the starting point of his work is a boundary, a geological fault, the focus that is outside the ellipse and calls for a cartography of resistance and imagination. Memory, absence, silence, and a few true words will be the tools to draw this map of lightness. If Mayorga’s aesthetics is immediately ethical, it is because what is represented is blended into how it is represented. The distorted perspective of a tortoise, or of a girl from the Warsaw ghetto can only be captured in the aesthetics of the fragment, the only way to modify the visible map. Theatre is that form of resistance, that temple of intimacy. A land where the Universal Human Condition is held in a few words and bodies, an assertion of imagination revealing that we will not drown separately. We will be saved together.