Cut by all sides, open by all corners, Gustavo Ciríaco’s new creation, invites the audience to a rhapsodic journey through the territories that configure the theatre as a scenic, sociological and architectonic space and its connections to the surrounding world. Thought as a site-specific project, Cut by all sides, open by all corners is an itinerant piece through the space of the theatre that operates like an expanded sculpture. The piece creates a field of positioning, staging and manipulation of the reality from where the spectator stands, building up an interpretation through a theater in dislocation.

Just as in a sculpture, where the cut gives access to a fruition that includes the reality around, the theatre is this multiple and complex site, cut by all sides, open by all corners, which hosts people in different platforms of interaction and distinct agents in operation. By way of comparison to the relational sculptures of minimalist artists Donald Judd and Robert Rauschenberg, characterized by the inclusion of elements of subtle interactive appeal, this project intends to displace and relocate the elements that produce theatricality. By moving these elements to other spaces in the same building and neighboring areas, the idea is to dispose them as provokers of performativity. An expanded theatre sets in, activated by the audience, through its position in space, its viewing point. A theatre is thus re-shaped with the same elements that distinguish it and constitute it as an experience.

The tableaux vivants were a popular form of theatrical representation in the 19th century. Following the spirit of moving images, a group of actors would reproduce an image in pause and gradually animate it. This project includes the participation of local volunteers in creative labs during the research, and later on during the life of the performance as a way to recover iconic images from the history of the performing arts. The piece wishes to update experiences that marked the habit of going to the theatre in the local and national context, by setting true inflexion points between the present and the past, with the complicity of the public, that reenact and give sequence to an archive of the performing arts.

The project foresees the participation of a team of 5 performers (actors and dancers) and, through an open call, a cast of local volunteers (inhabitants, regular theatre goers, people interested in performing arts). In a similar way to displacement of theatrical elements from its physical centre towards its spatial periphery, the idea behind conducting workshops in association with local initiatives as a way of audience mobilization, social insertion or professional improvement is to welcome agents from outside regular art contexts and invite them to explore the idea of making theater as the center of relationship between the theatre, its whereabouts and the world beyond. At the same time, attention is generated around the interstitial zone between fiction and its daily life, and the inside and the outside of the theatre.