Ídem 2024. International Performing Arts Festival
Ídem 2024 showcases the work of artists who address sensitive and crucial themes of modern society, reflecting on radical social isolation, marginal thinking, mental health, displacement, resistance, maroonism, fugitivity, and the dark vs light binomial.
Through artistic practice and activism, in formats ranging from performance and site-specific art to interactive installation, theatre and dance, these works establish a mutual dialogue while simultaneously invoking, provoking and challenging us.
What bodies matter? Who deserves a visible life? What lives are important?
With their poetic gazes, these proposals project the reflection of our intimate choices, our vulnerabilities, our ability to connect to and disconnect from reality. They speak to us about how to restore the networks of autonomy, affection and self-love.
This edition presents works by creators from France, Cuba and Palestine, and autonomous communities like Catalonia, Valencia and Zaragoza. The artists who take part in the different pieces come from Japan, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea, Ecuador and Dominican Republic.
The festival kicks off with HIKU, a piece that straddles performance and film (part fiction, part documentary), using robots to invoke in real time the Hikikomori, a community that has chosen a radical withdrawal from society and is shown here as a group that resists contemporary mandates. Presenting its work for the first time in Spain, the French company Shonen is directed by Eric Ming Cuong and Anne-Sophie Turión.
Paula Miralles and Vicente Arlandis (Taller Placer) premiere their site-specific piece Corrimiento al rojo [Fade to Red], inviting us to engage in an experience of darkness and collective transubstantiation. The proposal invokes other ways of composing our sensory imagination, and what is revealed by the things we hide.
Calidoscópica [Kaleidoscopic] by Sonia Gómez with Encarni Espallargas is a performance involving music and dance about two women who meet and share their experiences of mental health, creativity and well-being. The artists offer us a ringside seat of the potential implications of stigmatised insanity or mental disorder.
The second week of the festival begins with the Palestinian artist Basel Zaraa and the Spanish première of his piece Dear Laila (winner of the audience award at ZKB 2023). In this intimate, interactive installation, the artist shares the Palestinian experience of displacement and resistance through the story of one family, exploring how war and exile invade the everyday, the domestic and the public space. The piece uses the retelling of family memories and tactile details to bring this now destroyed place to life.
Victor Longás and Lucas Ares (Desgarradura) premiere The Miracle Worker, a piece conceived for the Courtyard at La Casa Encendida that uses different stage spaces to reflect on loneliness, isolation and the social disappearance of the individual, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality.
Ídem 2024 ends with the première of Eyilá by José Ramón Hernández and Osikán-Vivero de creación, which opens with a question: Where does the political strength of our spirituality lie? The artists developed the project with communities excluded from the social arena, by their own choice or by external imposition: Afro, migrant, trans and racialised peoples who construct a living archive of spirituality, memory, resistance, fugitivity, maroonism, reparation and healing.
Festival curated by Marisa Lull.
