The miracle worker, by Desgarradura

“There’s an image I think about when I close my eyes, alone before I fall asleep: from the living room window of my flat I see the man I’ve hired to kill me waiting for me on the opposite side of the street.”

The description of this image is what set Desgarradura to work on The Miracle Worker, thinking about how today it makes no sense to talk about loneliness, fugitivity and isolation with words; far better to try and do it like Aki Kaurismäki in I Hired a Contract Killer.

Based on that initial image, they continued:

“A man is so lonely that he pays to be killed, and that gives way to a sequence of the most beautiful, silent, inspiring and overwhelming images that someone in such a situation could ever hope to experience. From the precise moment he stops speaking and gives up everything he knows, everything he has always wanted is suddenly within his reach. We all know what we have, the world in which we live, what leads us to make radical, final decisions, and how we feel when we are making them. Everyone knows how we got here, to this pathetic, obligatory position as individuals in society. Rivers upon rivers of ink have flowed about loneliness and isolation, about an individual’s social disappearance. We’ve often wondered how we can disappear in our works, just like all those depressed Russian writers wondered. We’ve looked at all these issues from every possible angle, along with all the accompanying ones: failure, love, violence, insanity, death... All of them are both the symptoms and causes of a constant feeling of isolation, but now what? After all this, what can we do? After reaching such a clear understanding of the problem, where now?”

This piece harks back to the end of Desgarradura’s previous show Criadas based on Genet’s The Maids; to the end of the previous spaces and images they built, the texts announcing the end of meaning, the renunciation of their talent and the vow to never speak again. It revisits the chaos, when they said they were no longer going to seek explanations to all the questions they had, when they decided to become monsters swaying to the sound of a psychotic piano. That is where they are now, in a place where there is no longer any need to explain anything, to reflect on anything. They finish speaking about that image of the killer with a few words that represent a clear statement of intent and insight into this new work:

“Run for your lives, run! If you can, go. We won’t go after you, don't worry, run as fast as you can and don't look back. Go any way you can, but go. If you can, we’ll go together, if not separately, head first, it doesn't matter, just get out of here however you can, because knowing so much and being so clear about everything, all we can do is hope for a miracle.

The things that worry us are the things that give us hope. Hope is no longer of any use in world peace. We are all that’s left, thinking about the hope in all the things that surround and torment us, in each of us who decide to be together, moving like the people in Kaurismäki’s film, unable to speak but filled with hope.”

Lucas Ares (actor, dancer and stage creator) and Víctor Longás (set designer, plastic artist and stage creator) met at the Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático in Madrid in 2017 and began working together, merging their shared visions of the stage in different projects.

Since 2021, under the name Desgarradura, they have staged several of their own pieces: Díptico de Verónica at the Teatro de La Abadía, within the framework of the Domingos de Insurrección festival dedicated to contemporary creation in non-conventional venues, and at other venues like the Contenedor Cultural at the University of Málaga; and Criadas at the Teatro Galileo - Quique San Francisco, as part of the second Sala Joven festival, and at the Salón Teatro of the Centro Dramático Gallego.

In 2023 they received a curatorial grant for emerging talents from the Instituto Nacional de la Juventud, which led to the presentation throughout June of that year of El Poder: Live-Theater der spanischen Prostituierten, a project that challenges the boundaries of the conventional exhibition space, the white cube, by introducing the languages of the performing arts through spatial interventions, audiovisuals, performances, lectures and post-media interventions in a set that emulates a hyperrealist house, which can also serve as a labyrinth or house of horror.

Desgarradura’s work is situated at the intersection between the plastic arts and the performing arts, a space wrought with multiple tensions in which to understand and expand performance. They explore the cross between body, object, movement, word and image, with a special focus on the conditions of their bodies, and on stage, plastic and research projects through performance and the icons of popular culture. Their work revolves around the relationship between movement and the plastic arts, and around the construction of research projects through the visual arts, always at the very edge of the different languages. At the centre of their practice is the use of live video as an essential narrative device of the pieces, experimenting with images and the ways in which presences are generated on stage.