Debut performance

Warm sunlight spreads over the scene. A lost trunk as high as a man opens up, well travelled and worn down. The white linen shirt in it seem to breathe. The arms come to life softly, a head grows out of it and flowers bloom from compartments. Two persons climb out of this strange housing, float over the dance floor and begin to tell a magic story. Two persons on their own between the worlds. The world is their home and their world is yearnings and hopes. The point of departure and centrepiece of this production is a wardrobe trunk as big as a man, the trunk that Alejandro Tosatti’s father moved from Italy to Costa Rica with at the beginning of the 50’s. A symbol of travelling between cultures that proves to be highly adaptable and also lends not only the dancers wings, but also our imagination.

Diquis Tiquis has been in existence since 1983. Founded in San José, Costa Rica, the group found its own way to merge dance, theatre and mime with one another. Sandra Trejos and Alejandro Tosatti worked in the 70’s and 80’s in experimental theatre and dance companies in Costa Rica. Their work was influenced by post-modern dance, the spiritual values of the dance theatres of the Hindu, the honesty of Butoh, immediacy of the Czech clown Boleck Polivka and the roots of Latin-American culture. They studied the theory and the theatrical work in the sense of theatrical anthropology of Eugenio Barba. Since 1988, Diquis Tiquis are at national and international festivals and in most countries of Latin-America, in the United States and a number of European countries.

»The stylistic features of the poetic body theatre of the Diquis Tiquis Group are atmospheric concentration, surreal and strict motion quality, and on top of that a way of dealing with objects that breaks down the borders of perspectives« (Franz Anton Cramer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 09.01.2000).

The yearning and conciliatory side of the body, a bit of the harmony of opposites. The body’s motion stretches the bow to another culture and into the world of the surreal. A wonderfully moving vision of human theatre full of motion.