Back in 1987, drawn by the cross-pollination between popular culture and the Avant-garde, Jaime Santos and Aurea Pérez joined forces to form Chana Teatro. A small company that has drawn inspiration from musicians, painters, sculptors, writers, bricklayers, market gardeners, potters, carpenters, educators, philosophers, cattle ranchers, furriers, antique dealers, dancers, poets and innkeepers to bring the game of theatre to life.
Discovering a forest in a moustache, creating a tsunami with a dishcloth, herding cardboard cows, building civilisation with wooden blocks, recounting the parting of the Red Sea with a tambourine full of chickpeas… mythologising and de-mythologising; this has been his work over a 26-year career.
In love with the most everyday and insignificant objects, they have created a universe where the popular and the cultured unite to hold up a mirror to the viewer.
It's not about building dolls with objects or illustrating their theatre with them, but about bringing them to life through the meticulous study of their characteristics, the analysis of their components, and the context in which they operate.
That inert life of the object, that humanity of that which is stillborn, fires the imagination of La Chana Teatro and leads them to stage unusual versions of the most well-known classics, such as the Bible, the Glass Licentiate o The Life of Lazarillo of Tormes. Texts close to readers and non-readers, which La Chana Teatro twists, dissects, reinterprets, destroys, and reconstructs to find what is INTERESTING, what strikes everyone in their little heart or tickles their brain, with a single objective: to make theatre a living, timeless, and universal art from the simplest of things.
The work, to give this passionate game a name, is built with the hammer blow of metaphor, with mortar of sarcasm, reflective bricks, and sharp chromatic contrasts between the poetic and the routine.
Despite the inexorable march of time, which has already cracked their faces, their current endeavour, even while begging, centres on seeking out those young audiences who have fled theatres or who have never even had the chance to approach them. For this task, they will make use not of current affairs, nor fashion, nor even the spectacular, but of the primal, the radical, the simple, and above all, the enduring.
Over these 26 years, La Chana has performed in countless venues, from remote village stables to grand theatres, and has travelled extensively throughout Spain, France, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Argentina, Israel, Morocco, Niger, Colombia, and Brazil.
