Manifesto Poetico: Toward New Theatrical Languages

Abstract

Manifesto Poetico:Toward New Theatrical Languages Paige Allerton (bio), Carlos García Estévez (bio), and Johanna Skibsrud (bio) manifesto poetico is an international theater research group and production company that proposes a theater "for and with the people." 1 Their work began twenty-two years ago after artistic leader and founder carlos garcía estévez was provoked by his teacher, the renowned theater innovator jacques lecoq, to delve more deeply into the tragic depth of Commedia dell'Arte and masked performance. After years of research and collaborations with such artists as donato sartori, dario fo, tapa sudana, simon mcburney, and miquel barceló, carlos became a recognized authority on Contemporary Mask Performance. A contributor to the Routledge Companion to Commedia dell'Arte, 2 carlos has taught masked performance all over the world and presented at major conferences and festivals including at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the International Encounter of Theatre of the Oppressed, and the International Commedia dell'Arte Festival. In 2010—responding to a growing disassociation between the theater and more popular cultural forms—he was inspired to entirely reinvent his practice. What was necessary, he recognized, was not more or different forms of theater —that is, more or different depictions of human experience within a previously established representative mode—but new languages, new ways of communicating experience that could accommodate and employ the techniques and effects of our rapidly changing technologies, social realities, and points of view. [End Page 281] With this goal of arriving at new theatrical languages in mind, Carlos began collaborating with the performing artist and anthropologist Paige Allerton in 2014, a partnership that has expanded Manifesto Poetico's international reach and the scope of its research and philosophy. Today, Paige and Carlos codirect Manifesto Poetico, making theater using what they call "Spatial Dramaturgy"—a language where the abstraction of space, the spirit of imagination, and the essence of the collective form the basis of both narrative and emotional communication. Drawing on a range of artistic and scientific discourses and charging their work with the language of everyday experience, as well as with urgent contemporary issues, Manifesto Poetico seeks to challenge performers and audiences alike to rethink the possibilities of theater, composition, and imagination. Their ideas are regularly tested through their itinerant research laboratory, the aim of which is to challenge practitioners to change their ways of seeing in both a physical and an intellectual or theoretical sense. Within an international, multidisciplinary, and multilingual context, Laboratory participants are invited to engage with what shapes communication at an elemental level: the deep, structural realities of space and time. This research is applied, in turn, through Manifesto Poetico's TransPoetico Productions. For these productions, the group is commissioned by theaters, festivals, performing art centers, and theater academies from all over the world to create and direct shows with casts of local artists. Recent TransPoetico Productions include: Nama Kamu Atas Perahu (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2013), Tito's Dream (Storrs, CT, 2014), Bogota in Action (Bogotá, Colombia, 2015), New York Lands (New York, NY, 2016), Klassiek van de Toekomst (Haarlem, Netherlands, 2017), Hann: Voices of a Bay (Dakar, Senegal, 2018), and PULSE (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2018). The core aim of these and other Manifesto Poetico productions is to investigate and apply the basic shared elements of human perspective and experience—what Carlos refers to as "universals." Everyone, everywhere, Carlos reminds his students, experiences gravity. Everyone knows up, down. Everyone knows push, pull, fixed point. Manifesto Poetico works with local artists and theater collectives to explore these foundational elements, which also serve as potential points of connectivity between persons—both human and nonhuman. Today, when—as Paige puts it—"isolation, disconnect, removal, division, categorization, partitions, competition and ownership are within the architecture of globalized civilization," she and Carlos propose a theater of connection and [End Page 282] contact that might move us beyond the preconceived limits of individual perspective and established discursive modes. Recalling the Greek etymology of the word "Trans," which means to go beyond, and the etymological root of the word "Poetic," which refers to creation—to making or doing—TransPoetico emphasizes the group's conscious effort to go beyond what has been created by...