Concrete Matter uses mother-daughter relationships to talk about realisation and projection. As is usual for Los Detectives, they focus on female inspirations and bodies; in this case, their own, but also those of their own mothers who share the stage with them.
The conceptual framework of the piece consists of layers interweaving a range of inspirational models. On the one hand, accomplished women like the feminist artists of the seventies such as Hannah Wilke, Pauline Oliveros and Yvonne Rayner; on the other, Chekhov’s play Three Sisters, which talks about the impossibility of realisation and which helps generate additional dramatic layers that the company use to engage with their own frustrations.
Concrete Matter is a game played on stage that questions the role of theatre as the location of lies, with fiction the device used to ‘make us believe’ the action by playing with expectations and the sense of loss felt by the performers, the characters they interpret and the audience itself.
Los Detectives are Mariona Naudin, María García Vera, Marina Colomina and Laia Cabrera. The company, formed in 2016 in Barcelona, develops projects simultaneously investigating ‘the feminine’ and the possibilities of performance, questioning the limits of both to generate their own language from the themes they address and the formats they put forward.
Their various backgrounds range from anthropology to cinema to fine arts to biology, and they have made the most of their interests to expand their performance language and reach out towards a more visual view of the body, nourished by exhaustive research work that interprets models from the fields of humanities, film and art, taking ‘the theatrical’ to a personal level unrelated to fields.
