An ongoing international collaboration with team members from Mexico, Canada, and the United States:
THE GAME OF CARDENIO questions how and why to defend classical theater in the face of our awareness of gender violence.
Using a theatrical structure inspired by board games and based on the body/dance as the axis of the scene, we will explore new ways of staging the classics. The “search” of Cardenio, Shakespeare 's lost work inspired by episodes from Cervantes ' Don Quixote , will be the guiding thread of this adventure.
Counterpoint Player and Efe Tres Teatro are two companies committed to finding 21st century perspectives in classic dramatic texts. Through contemporary theater techniques we explore the way in which the problems of the 16th century are relevant today. When working with the classics, we seek to find ourselves in them .
With THE GAME OF CARDENIO we can continue these explorations: our goal is to maintain “friendship” with classic texts while confronting the undeniable gender violence they contain. Since CARDENIO is a lost text based on episodes from Don Quixote, we have absolute freedom in exploration, because we do not have the “obligation” to adhere to an "original text." In parallel, it also invites us to explore the similarities between the colonial legacies of Mexico, the United States and Canada, through the intersection between British and Spanish classics.
This project represents a first for everyone in different ways: working with an international team, working in different languages and working with dance/movement as the main language of communication with the audience. We wish to push our artistic practices by creating with these new collaborators and the influences and techniques that each one brings to the process. We also aim to showcase the work beyond local stages to reach both national and international audiences.
We plan to experiment with board game mechanics to include the audience in our journey to find the lost text. Both board games and video games are in a stage of reinvention, pushing the boundaries of narrative structures allowing players to be an active participant in the process of story development in ways that are rare in theater. That is why we see THE GAME OF CARDENIO as an opportunity to be an active part in the search for new theatricalities. Interaction with the public will make the experience more dynamic and fun. At the same time, viewers are involved in questioning how to confront gender violence.