ALBERTO CORTÉS (MÁLAGA, 1983). STAGE DIRECTOR, PLAYWRIGHT AND PERFORMER OF MY OWN DRIFTS.
BIOGRAPHY
I graduated in Stage Direction and Playwriting at the ESAD in Malaga and in Art History at the UMA. In 2009 I began my stage career with a bastard and peripheral dramaturgy that has been evolving over time. Since then I have not stopped colliding with various creators and friends who have inspired my path, and generating pieces of different formats and disciplines in an attempt to continue to have hope in the intangible, the spiritual and the human. My work has developed over the years through theatre pieces, dance, performance and also folklore, flamenco or site-specifics; I accompany processes of other creators from the direction and dramaturgy and I give workshops as meetings where I share the research I am going through. At a certain moment my path has stopped at the idea of understanding the stage as the space of desire and the romantic relationship with the spectator. In 2022 I published ‘Los montes son tuyos’ with the publishing house ‘Continta me tienes’ which collects the texts of the plays, ‘El Ardor’ and ‘One night at the golden bar’. My last play, ‘Analphabet’, was premiered at the end of 2024; the book ‘Siempre vengo de noche’, which collects the text of the play, was published after the premiere. Today I inhabit my identity as a creator, performer, director, playwright, companion, teacher, son, brother, uncle, lover, friend.
ACTIVE CREATIONS
CREATIONS / 2024
ANALPHABET
«At sunset, after a couple of lovers argue loudly on the beach of Gulpiyuri, a romantic ghost called Analphabet appears over the sea to narrate its story and sing songs to the couple».
Analphabet is the invention of a myth: that of a romantic spirit that manifests itself to couples in natural environments and that lives trapped in the wound of the flesh; and whose appearance reveals the ravine we call ‘lovers’ couple’ and the mistreatment to which we subject ourselves within that amatory structure. Her personal story opens up the box of intra-gender violence and exposes the need to take extreme care in queer relationships, which are marked by patriarchal inheritance. As a tormented spirit, she drinks from the poetry of German romanticism and its landscapes (Goethe, Hölderlin or Novalis have accompanied this writing), but she also draws on Andalusian idiosyncrasy and the mortal wound of a love in Euskadi. The ghost, although he comes dying and wounded on a horse, brings with him a hope: what poetry can do for the wound.
Concept, dramaturgy, texts, direction and interpretation: Alberto Cortés / Violin and conversations: Luz Prado / Lighting design: Benito Jiménez / Lighting technicians: Benito Jiménez y Cristina Bolívar / Sound: Oscar Villegas y Pablo Contreras / Technical coordination: Cristina Bolívar / Piano recordings: César Barco / Scenic space: Víctor Colmenero / Costumes: Gloria Trenado / External view: Mónica Valenciano / Photography: Clementina Gades / Video: Johann Pérez Viera / Production: El Mandaíto Producciones SL / A co-production of: TNT Terrasa Noves Tendències, Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque, FITEI-Festival Internacional de Teatro de Expressáo Ibérica, Centre de les Arts Lliures de la Fundació Joan Brossa y Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Cádiz / With the collaboration of: Azala, Graner, Goethe-Institut Madrid, Escena Patrimonio, Festival de Otoño, Programa de Residencias Artísticas de la Agencia Andaluza de Instituciones Culturales y Ayuntamiento de La Rinconada
CREATIONS / 2022
ONE NIGHT AT THE GOLDEN BAR
I called «One night at the golden bar» the experience of making myself vulnerable in order to find the beauty that appears in the cheesy, affected, outdated and queer declaration of love. Writing from ecstasy and from the romantic, the speaker and the investigation of the sung and set to music voice appeared; in short, I wanted to find a song that highlights the fragility of affection from the queer gaze. I want to invoke the figure of the angel from some kind of invented heaven, to ask myself about which identities are in that vulnerable and monstrous place at the same time, and how we are going to protect these bodies when they are exposed in their fragility.
To understand myself I tell myself that this is about what the fires of desire and love did with my body and my language thinking about other men. Along the way, all the unresolved cracks appear to me that form part of the unfathomable associated with the romantic; the tensions between the theories we formulate to invent new ways of relating to male toxicity and the heteronorma and at the same time the capacity to fall sick with desire before The Man who ploughs the earth. That crack is this performance. Although it could also be the attack that Ana Torroja sings in La Fuerza del Destino when she says ‘one night in the Gold bar I decided to attack’. And it could also be what Rilke said: ‘every angel is terrible’. Or all those other things I see when I sing of love but don’t understand.
Concept, dramaturgy, texts and interpretation: Alberto Cortés / Music and sound space: Cèsar Barco Manrique / Lighting: Benito Jiménez / Sound: Pablo Contreras / Costumes: Gloria Trenado / Movement assistance: María Cabeza de Vaca / Stage assistance: Víctor Colmenero / Photography and video: Clementina Gades y Alejandra Amere / With the collaboration of: Teatro Calderón de Valladolid, Junta de Andalucía (Residencias Ágora), Centro Conde Duque y Graners de Creació / Acknowledgments: La Poderosa, Labo XL, Rebeca, Iver, Claudia, Mariquiña, Esther y Peru