Our journey starts at an eerie port. Through the blue mist we recognise the bow of an old wooden ship, anchored in melancholy, waiting to sail out to sea. Suddenly, a mysterious man dressed in a large coat appears: “Tonight we shall only do what the heart dictates”, says Chino Amado, lead singer of Los Amados and natural born macho latino. Are these welcoming words or a warning? For love is as much of a blessing as it is a curse…

The cast of Los Amados (courtesy of Los Amados)

For Los Amados, however, it’s been all about success. This company of actors/musicians was born in 1989, when actor Alejandro Viola imagined a Latin big band that could combine music, dramatisation and humour in the name of love. He assembled a group of musicians with histrionic dispositions and they all proceeded to create their alter egos: characters somewhat anchored in the 1940s or 50s, with evocative names such as Pocholo Santamaría and Mambo Méndez, that dress up in an almost Almodovarian fashion (saturated colors, glossy textures, and flowers, lots of flowers!), wearing greasy tufts and prominent moustaches.

The band’s repertoire, just as the staging (how on Earth did they come up with that giant, twinkling swan?), aims to take the audience to the very core of that crazy, corny little thing called love. Through the rhythms of Colombian cumbia, Cuban bolero, Dominican merengue, Uruguayan candombe and many other regional sounds, Los Amados pay a hyperbolic tribute to romance that has won several local awards such as the prestigious ACE, the Teatro del Mundo and the Estrella de Mar. Their latest invention, El danzón de Los Amados, was nominated for no less than four ACE awards this year: Best Musical, Best Director, Best Costume Design and Best Actor – this last category was won by Alejandro Viola.

El danzón is also their first show to include a ballroom “to dance like in the old times, or new times. Following the music, we come close to each other, we caress each other, we go crazy, we are set on fire, we desire, we break apart and we come together again, we smile, we have fun”. Sounds like too much of a romantic spectacle? Well, it is – a preposterous, over the top display that comes to life every Friday and Saturday night at Sala Siranush, in Palermo, where candlelit tables, Armenian delicacies, and a nice bottle of Argentine Malbec help to kindle passions.

But they key word here is humour. Through well-timed gags (in clear Spanish and accompanied by explicit and just as funny body language), Los Amados warm up a firstly timid and discrete audience, until everything is set to let emotions go wild. After that, infatuated couples dance and embrace, kiss and whisper in each other’s ears, yielding to the magical spell of romance. It’s rosy, sparkly, dazzling… almost embarrassing, but nevertheless irresistible when sensuous and joyful Latin American songs such as “Soy lo prohibido”, “Merengue pa degustar”, “Bravo”, and “El día que me quieras” are played.

Sexy in Purple (courtesy of Los Amados)

Los Amados are talented showmen and they truly give an unforgettable performance. Nevertheless, the best things happen off stage, because the audience is composed of lovers of all ages, from their early twenties to almost eighties. The guy with a mohawk is just as bewildered by cha cha cha as the grandpa with a hump. The girl in the tight purple dress feels sexy, and so does the housewife who is celebrating her 54th birthday. There are boys hugging other boys, and girls holding hands. To sum up, there are all kinds of love and people feel free and comfortable to express them in the universal language of music.

When the clock strikes midnight and almost three hours have gone by, Los Amados board their ship, wave goodbye and set sail to their imaginary sea, leaving us all in exhausted ecstasy. Walking back home in one of the last winter nights in Buenos Aires, this kind of experience makes you feel like Spring is just around the corner.

Miss Bolivia playing at Ciudad Emergente 2012 (Photo: Lautaro Aránguiz)

If you have been craving a plethora of youth culture activities stuffed into a one medium sized area, then Ciudad Emegente held at Cultural Centro Recoleta between 6th-10th June is right up your street.

With more things going on than you can shake your stick at, the “five days which will join the pulse of half a million young people who pass through the festival,” is a clear effort by Buenos Aires City Government to once again desperately show that they’re at the forefront of porteño youth culture.

For the fifth year, Ciudad Emergente will be cramming live bands, DJs, VJs, fashion, poetry, film, street art, street dance, stand up comedy, theatre, digital art and interactive art, into a five day long extravaganza. Basically, everything and anything associated with youth culture as they can possibly get their hands on.

The festival will be showcasing work and holding lectures from some of the most interesting Argentines currently capturing the digital and graphic art worlds. Famous Argentine graphic designer Alejandro Ros, is exhibiting his infamous designs for CD sleeves, and street artist Lucas Grothesque, will be painting the courtyard. The ‘3D’ theatre spectacle Hombre Vertiente will take its viewers on a water odyssey every night at 9pm, which if you haven’t seen already, take the opportunity to see what you’ve been missing for free.

Although the festival is a platform for up and coming Argentine musicians, it is also made some stage time for big name Latin American bands throughout the week. Bomba Estéreo, one of the largest contemporary Colombian bands, are headlining the first night of the festival with their experimental-brand of cumbia will surely be a crowd pleaser.

People at the entrance of Centro Cultural Recoleta during the opening of Ciudad Emergente 2012 (Photo: Lautaro Aránguiz)

At 6pm on Thursday, see Chilean Ana Tijoux, whose mixed roots and political heritage is feistily exhibited in a rap/hip-hop/Latino infusion. Growing up in France after her parents were exiled from Chile during General Pinochet’s dictatorship, she started out rapping in French and Spanish, moving on to form Tiro de Gracia, the best selling Chilean rap group of all time. Expect politically motivated songs such as Shock, which was inspired by the student protests, and an impressive display of MC-ing 1977.

And then there is Miss Bolivia, whose cheeky reggae is probably the best (and only) aggressive, feminist, lesbian, tropi-cumbia rap you’ll hear all year. Watch her sneer and gyrate in her video for Alta Yama, then be impressed by the fact she’s just as likely to rap about the drug epidemic in South America or the beauty of pluralism as she is about ripping her thong off.

Street dancing will be taking centre stage on the Patio del Ajibe everyday at 4.30pm and 6.30pm, with body poppers and break-dancers contorting themselves in a way that would make your grandma blush. For old school b-boying check out Los Fabulosos Bboys or current Campeonato Knock Out competition holders Terrible Style Crew.

When you need to chill out from all the noise and movement, head to Sala 4 for a spot of spoken word. Almost agonisingly young and talented, emerging Argentine poets and lyricists will be reading their work aloud. Magazine lovers can discover the cream of Argentine youth publications in Sala 12, both events running from Thursday to Sunday.

Also catch brilliant music documentaries on in the BAFICI space, featuring “Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon”, “Leonard Cohen: Live at Isle of White”, Arcade fire’s “Mirror Noir”, and Chemical Brothers’s exhilarating “Don’t Think”. Spanish Film Quiero Tener una Ferretería en Andalucía unveils the lost years of Joe Strummer in Southern Spain, giving a rare insight into the iconic but enigmatic Clash frontman.

If all this isn’t enough, each night at 8.30pm a cutting-edge Argentine fashion designer will be speaking about the aesthetics of their designs.

Phew. The best part? It’s completely free. FREE!!!

IdeaMe is an online platform, which helps creators, be they inventors, artists, or designers, among others, to finance their projects through crowd funding. Each week, the Indy features and promotes one project every week, with the aim of helping the creators finance and achieve their dreams. This week: Teatro Ciego.

Teatro Ciego is located in Abasto (Photo courtesty of Teatro Ciego)

Theatre is, without a doubt, a visual experience. While sound is not absent, the emphasis is laid on what you see. The audience looking in one direction, collectively watching on stage action. They watch actors’ movements and facial expressions, while cleverly placed lighting visually heightens tension, drama and emotion.

As such, ‘blind theatre’, in which the entire concept of visuality is removed from your theatre experience and replaced by absolute darkness, may seem like a bizarre idea.

Yet, El Teatro Ciego has been plunging theatre audiences into disconcerting darkness for the last ten years. With a wealth of experience, the group has established themselves as the only blind theatre group in the world, offering a highly unique and alternative theatrical experience.

This week’s IdeaMe project sees one of Buenos Aires’ most innovative theatre groups hoping to raise funds to put on their next play. This time round, the actors are presenting their own interpretation of the contemporary Argentine comic, Inodoro Pereyra, in total darkness.

Written by writer and cartoonist Roberto Fontanorrosa in 1976, the work follows the life of Inodoro Pereyra, a solitary gaucho. The character parodies traditional gaucho figures of Argentine literature, not least Argentina’s most famous gaucho, Martin Fierro. The use of incessantly repeated phrases and Pereyra’s bizarre characteristics allows the author to poke fun at accepted and tired notions of gaucho tradition.

In preparation, the group are studying the entire work, comprising of more than 20 chapters. Through a selection of the best and most important parts of the comic, the group are creating their own play, offering a unique interpretation of a popular story, well-known to many Argentines.

The idea for blind theatre originally arose in 1991, and El Teatro Ciego was born after founder Ricardo Sued became inspired by the Tibetan notion of “Zen”, seeking to create a unique theatrical experience, in which theatre-goers were rendered blind.

By placing audience members in the dark, El Teatro Ciego forces audience members to ‘see’ by using other senses.

Comparable to how the blind or partially sighted find alternative ways to visualise the world around them, members are encouraged to focus on hearing and feeling, as well as trusting and working with others in the audience in order to understand and ‘watch’ the plays being presented.

The theatre group then not only upturns theatrical norms, but also radically changes the notion of visuality: the emphasis is not laid on seeing things exactly how they are, but instead on visualising plays in an imaginative and personal way. As the group so aptly puts it: “The darkness excites the senses and works to destroy the preconceived notions of how we see things and replace it with them with how we imagine them.”

While the group is quick to note that “this is not a theatre of blind actors nor is it for the blind,” El Teatro Ciego also allows blind and partially sighted actors, as well as those with disabilities, to work in an environment that would usually present obstacles to them. One actress in the group, Julia Francisquez, says “theatre in the dark gave me the chance to work and prove what I’m capable of.”

The experience of theatre in the dark also aims at social inclusion, and to give members an understanding of what it is like to be blind, allowing them to discover how it is possible to see even when the physical ability to do so has been lost, partially or altogether.

While El Teatro Ciego remains the only blind theatre worldwide, the group needs help with funding, in order to uphold the highly innovative and unique theatrical experience offered equally to audience members as well as blind and partially sighted actors.

“We want to generate a deep impact with this show, we want to share it with a wider audience,” says Martin Bondone, director of the group. “We know that theatre in the dark is good for people, and it has a positive effect on the people that experience it.”

Buenos Aires major Mauricio Macri will tonight inaugurate a new 15,000 square metre art center in the southern neighborhood of La Boca, which has been built within a former recuperated industrial complex.

Usina de Arte, the new art center financed by the state with an investment of $110m, will welcome up to 1,600 spectators and will also include a mini-cinema for 200 people and a space dedicated to exhibitions.

To celebrate the opening of the new cultural center, an orchestra will play a tribute concert to the famous Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla (starting from 7pm).

Producer and new art director of Usina de Arte, Ricardo Szwarcer, dreams that the art center will become the “cultural centre of 21st century” for Buenos Aires, a place for “surprise, innovation and experimentation,” newspaper La Nacion reported.

Last night, yet another historical cultural space was opened to the public on the ashes of a recuperated factory of spark plugs for light bulbs.

El Picadero, located in the mythical passage Enrique Santos Discépolo between Corrientes Avenue and Riobamba, housed the counter-culture movement Teatro Abierto, one of the most relevant forms of cultural opposition during the last dictatorship.

Born as a cooperative of actors at the end of the 70s, it soon became a place of attraction for political dissidents ever since the company moved to El Picadero Theater under the direction of Antonio Monaco in 1981. A bomb later destroyed part of the building, which re-opened today after a committee of neighborhoods saved it from being demolished.

The group Basta de Demoler, who saved the building from decay, reckoned that the place needed to be rescued for its cultural relevance as a “bastion of democracy.”

With a capacity of 292 seats, the new Picadero will starts its season next week with the piece Forever Young.

Herman Melville’s short story, about a reclusive copyist who refuses to adhere to the norms of a “snug” legal firm in mid-nineteenth century Manhattan, might not appear the most theatrical of material. But its sparse, masterly dialogue, adapted by Andrés Chan, lends itself aptly to stage performance.

The theatre’s intimate setting, coupled with its stark set, places the audience firmly in the humdrum world of legal clerks. Employees, including the “piratical-looking” Nipper (Gervasio Levalle) and the obstreperous Turkey (Diego Patrisso), are presided over by the narrator – a mild, law-abiding citizen (Guillermo Caranzano). Caricatures of Dickensian proportions, their eccentric tics and fits of rage are counterpointed like clockwork.

An increased demand in copies prompts the firm to bring in a strange young man by the name of Bartleby (Germán Pierotti). “Pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn,” his world-weary, anonymous mode of existence, the narrator laments, confounds biography.

Bartleby, for his part, is apportioned a mere 37 lines, which he delivers with ever so slight, tantalising variations on the same theme. His taciturn mode of resistance is commensurate with his refusal to proffer any backstory or anecdote that might contextualise his existence and identify him as a full-rounded ‘character’.

The concision and deceptive transparency of Melville’s text is preserved in the Borgesian translation, deflecting and multiplying signification a pace with the copies penned by its deferential clerks. The dull routine is punctured only by the comic duo’s droll gaggle and by the absurdity of the narrator’s attempts to account for his taciturn employee’s eccentricities.

Initially, Bartleby punches the clock admirably, producing copies at a mechanical rate. But it soon becomes clear that he is not cut out for this style of work, refusing point blank to reexamine his own quadruplicate copies. Declining to participate in the daily round of mutual rehashed pleasantries, Bartleby’s disarming peculiarities, his bizarre exemptions from conventional ‘duties’, confound his coworkers. His laconic, disconcerting refrain, “I would prefer not to”, sends his placid boss into spasms of consternation that soon boil over into full-blown fury.

Bartleby’s air of reasonableness, his platitude and impersonality nonetheless command attention, and elicit sympathy from his superior. In line with Melville’s narration, the stage performance is interspersed with spotlit monologues from the narrator. Caranzano delivers a virtuoso performance as he tries to rationalise the passive resistance of his reticent subject according to the law of cause and effect. But the more he tries to wrestle with Bartleby’s enigma, the clearer it becomes that he eludes all conventional understanding. At the same time that his signature retort, suspended as it is without any qualifications, implicates him in Bartleby’s fate.

By the time the office workers have involuntarily cottoned on to Bartleby’s subversive lexicon of “preference”, the narrator resolves that his errant employee will have to go. But to little avail. Bartleby refuses to comply with the codes of conduct that would demand that he remove himself from the premises. His continued, unremunerative presence subverts the whole notion of tacit acceptance engrained in the Anglo-American work ethic.

Bartleby is given an ultimatum: either he must act or be duly punished. In line with his mode of passive nihilism, he relinquishes himself to the authorities. Comic beginnings herald tragic ends. But Bartleby’s damned phrase echoes on, threatening to dismantle the whole system of privatised bureaucratic functionality. In the wake of Anonymous’ recent incursion upon America’s financial heartland – the play’s subtitle ‘A Story of Wall Street’ – seems more relevant than ever.

Photo Courtesy of Monte Madre

IdeaMe is an online platform, which helps creators, be they inventors, artists, or designers, among others, to finance their projects through crowd funding. The Indy features and promotes one project every week, with the aim of helping the creators finance and achieve their dreams.

Even through adversity, love manages to bloom.

And our project this week hopes to promote one Argentine story of how this is true.

La Legendaria Theatre Club is getting set for ‘Monte Madre’, a play that tells the true story of how a young couple of militants managed to evade the dictatorship’s clutches, living in nature and bringing two children into the world.

Alan Robinson said he was moved when he first read the story of the couple, Remo Venica and Irmina Kleiner.

“I liked it a lot,” he said. “I read it in one night, entirely, in one night on the bus from Entre Ríos to Buenos Aires.”

La Legendaria Theatre Club is a group of seven people, and each one has a role as actor and producer. This is the second play for the group.

“We want to start to make theatre jobs professions,” he said. “So that actors in theatre can live as actors, and they don’t have to do commercials, television or movies.”

This play takes place between 1974 and 1978 in Argentina. The lovers hid in the forest and survived by nature before and during the last dicatorship.

During the first few years, they were hunted by the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (AAA).

“Everyone who was politically affiliated with social work, all the people who were socialists of some sort, who were with socialism looking for a better world – they were persecuted by the AAA,” Robinson said.

When the dictatorship began in 1976 the pair, Venica and Kleiner, had to hide from the military and others.

“It wasn’t just a military coup d’etat,” he said. “There were also support from private capitalists or support from certain sectors of society, the church, among others.”

Robinson said there are four important themes, the first of which is love.

“We are going to tell the story of love during a dictatorship,” he said. “We are going to talk about love, in the first place. This is our central theme.”

Photo Courtesy of Monte Madre

Survival is the next important theme.

“How to live in the natural world,” he said.

Spirituality is another theme the cast will be focusing on.

“We are working with spiritual conflicts,” he noted.

Lastly, Robinson said identity plays an important role in Monte Madre.

“It’s a very present theme, and it’s an actual theme – like the identity of the children of the disappeared,” he said. “In this play, the couple was not disappeared, but exiled. But we’re going to work on the theme of the identity of the generation that is between 25 and 35 who are people – the children of the people who were disappeared.”

He also said it is good to get a different discourse on the last dictatorship, that it does not happen again.

“That we don’t have discourses that take us back to living this terrible experience,” he said.

Love is a way to help repair his parents’ generations wounds, he said, noting that they will be using magical realism.

“It’s a very Latin American genre,” he noted. “It’s natural.”

As one would guess from the theme of survival, things end happily for the couple. Today, Venica and Kleiner are spreading their love for nature by working on the organic farm “Naturaleza Viva,” educating people and producing food based on ideas of respecting the earth and all its beings.

Monte Madre will first come to stage in the form of two previews for friends, producers and reporters in November 2012. The play will be open to the public from the 24th March, 2013.

Former British Primer Minister Margaret Thatcher has been put on the spotlight once more (Press Image)

The 30th anniversary of the Malvinas/Falklands War has spawned a number of cultural events -books, films, exhibitions- which seek to analyse and to make sense of the motives behind the war. At a time when the United Kingdom is being governed by the Tories after a 13-year hiatus, the figure of former British Primer Minister Margaret Thatcher has been put on the spotlight once more.

The play ‘Hundan el Belgrano’, which opens tonight, is a satirical take on the behind-the-scenes of the war and of one of its most crucial and tragic moments, the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano. The play is based on ‘Sink the Belgrano!’ by British writer Steven Berkoff. It revolves mainly around the character of Thatcher, called Maggot Scratcher in the original and renamed Amargas Cachas for the Argentine version (something like ‘bitter bum cheeks’).

The play has only been performed once before, in London in 1986, to mixed reviews. Unsurprisingly, since 1986 was only four years after the war and Thatcher was still the triumphant primer minister. About the play, the author has stated that “…this kind of theatre is so powerful, so visceral, that it forces audiences to react: either they feel like fleeing the building or they are suddenly convinced that it is the best thing they have ever seen”. That is a fair description.

In the current adaptation by director Claudia Marocchi, the stage is empty but for a couple of big wooden modules that get shifted around between scenes. Lighting and music effects are powerful and make up for the bare scenography. There is a guitar player on stage at all times and every now and then the characters break into song.

The wardrobe is definitely odd: all the male characters, save for the Argentine president, wear high heels. Some even wear patent leather, S&M-style knee-high boots. The dialogue, in verse, is crude but funny at the same time.

Just like Berkoff said, the spectators find themselves wondering what on earth is this bizarre display they are witnessing, only to forget about their reservations the moment the next funny line comes along (and they abound). The eccentric and hilarious interactions between Amargas Cachas and her sidekicks are interrupted by scenes of the submarines making their way south, and trying to make sense of their situation. The brief solemnity is in turn interrupted by bouts of camp Village People-style dancing and the appearance of the Admiral in his tight, silver hot pants.

Whilst bizarre and laugh-out-loud funny, the play is deeply political. It brings to the forefront the domestic political landscape of the UK

"Hundan el Belgrano", an original play deeply political (Press Image)

in 1982 -the unemployment, the strikes, the threat of the Labour party- giving a context to the decision to fight back against Argentina. Amargas Cachas’ question “Where are the Falklands?”, repeated a couple of times at the beginning of the play, reinforces the point that this war was not about the islands or the islanders. In that respect, the main message of ‘Hundan el Belgrano’ is faithful to the maxim of Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, who famously said that “war is merely a continuation of politics by other means”.

The actors do a great job in their physically demanding roles, especially the protagonists Monina Bonelli (Amargas Cachas) and Gastón Rodríguez (Alcahuete/Admiral). The translator, Rafael Spregelburd, deserves a special mention for adapting the language of the play to an Argentine slang-heavy, curse-heavy dialogue that is funny and doesn’t sound contrived.

Whilst the play is a satire, it never forgets that it’s dealing with a serious historical event. Towards the end, as the moment when the sinking of the Belgrano approaches and the message about the hundreds of lives lost hits home, the comically bizarre reveals itself tragically grotesque. The burlesque-style music number at the end of the play is not enough to shake the viewer out of a reflective mood. Because despite the glitz, war is always a serious matter.

There is a line of latitude connecting Buenos Aires to Cape Town, South Africa: the 34°S. Through this parallel, the two countries exchange performing art and theatre thanks to Proyecto 34°S, the independent artistic exchange behind Theatre in Translation.

Back in 2010, Proyecto 34°S asked playwrights from both Africa and Latin America to submit their plays for a theatre contest: the winners each won a trip to the other country to present at the premier of the translated version of their plays.

Two years later, the experiment lives on thanks to an online library that showcases African and Latin-American dramas selected throughout the Theatre in Translation/Teatro en Traducción (TT) project.

An eclectic collection of 20 plays from these two continents is now available to download in both English or Spanish, to allow readers “stepping into the other worlds created by the talented, courageous, sensitive and funny writers featured here,” as it reads on the Proyecto 34°S’ website. A book featuring the top plays was also printed in few hundred copies and it is available on request.

“We are planning to premier the winning South-African play, called Luce Verde in Spanish [Green Man Flashing in English] here, next November,” explains Nikki Froneman, founder and director of Proyecto 34°S.

“In the long-term, our objective is to establish a biennial festival of African theatre in Latin America and vice versa. But this is huge. In the meantime, we decided to work with already existing festivals in Latin America, so they can start including more African content – and of course the other way round. This way, people can get used to the idea, so it would be easier from there to move forwards.”

In 2009, Nikki Froneman planted the first seeds of her ambitious project with the production the first Festival of South African Theatre in Buenos Aires.

During five days of performances from three award-winning South African theatre companies, more than 1200 people enjoyed the cross-country cultural immersion offered. The programme also included live music performances as well as the screening of a documentary.

Proyecto 34°S has an erratic character, following the nomadic life of its founder, Nikki, shuffling back and forth from Cape Town to Buenos Aires many times a year.

Last summer, Nikki brought the Argentine play Machitún to the South African National Arts fest. Directed by Argentine Javier Drucaroff and featuring choreography and performance by Cirque du Soleil acrobats, it was an outdoor spectacle with flying bouncing acrobats, ethereal dance and dream-like live electronic music.

“For our TT project, we tent to look for plays that had a very strong physical theatre component, so that it wasn’t very text based and people could understand it better. Even though we worked with text-based plays as well,” Nikki explains.

Plays, however, are not the only cultural product exchanged across the 34°S parallel.

“We are making sure that the wider community gets also involved in what we do. We work basically in replicating the format with local structures of the production, so it can stay in the country for much longer period, in order to exchange not only theatre but everything that could come out of that.”

This philosophy indeed reflects the short-term goal of Proyecto 34°S and its spin-off, the TT project: to get the plays off the page – in new languages, new places, with new casts – and new audiences watching, enjoying, absorbing and, most of all, thinking.

It comes easy to Nikki to explain why African theatre might be relevant, or at least thought provoking, for an Argentine audience too.

“Here in Argentina, people are not so much struggling with the big questions: ‘who/what/where/when are we?’ Everyone seems to be very clear about relationships between different groups of the society,” she points out.

“On the other hand, South African theatre is still quite concrete when talking about drama and real life issue. Where Argentine drama is on a more experiential level, more intellectual perhaps, in South Africa a lot of time you still deal with more concrete issues in terms of subject matter.”

In terms of staging, however, South African plays can be extremely creative. “We do a lot of experimentation with non-realistic staging too, like setting a play in the middle of a dusty road in the country-side, and perhaps we are a little be more interactive with using the stage,” said the South African-born theatre producer.

The big difference between the South African arts scene and the Argentine one is, however, a matter of scale, size and opportunities.

“Here in Argentina there is so much theatre around that it is possible to see everything, everywhere. The trick is to find very good stuff. There are some 500 theatres in Buenos Aires: a commercial circuit (Corrientes), than state theatre (San Martin, Sarmiento) and then independent circuit (San Telmo, Microcentro, Almagro, Palermo). It’s so huge that artists can live off their art, perhaps by doing classes in five different places, working for three different shows at the same time, [working on] solo shows, coaching etc.”

“In South Africa, however, it’s either you are in Arts or you are not. The industry and audience are small.”

For people working at Proyecto 34°S, there is still a lot to learn and to be exchanged, as Nikki admits. “Rather than comparing South Africa with the US, Europe or Netherlands, we prefer to exchange experiences with Latin America. From a development, social, cultural and technological point of view, we are on a completely different level from those places.”

Buenos Aires has therefore been a bridgehead. “That there are a lot of similarities between South America and us, we are going to keep exploring them,” she said, widening the scope of the Proyecto 34°S vision. Perhaps, more similarities than people could think of.

Proyecto 34°S will be encouraging the promotion of a much wider social consciousness and cultural understanding also in Brasil, at the Escena Contemporanea festival in July, and with its on-going collaboration with the Mercosur Festival in Cordoba.

The hard part was to create a contact. Then, cultures and continents easily unfold ahead.

“The plan is to invade a house…to create a theatrical experience;” a beat from improvisational folk-singer Devendra Banhart plays in the background.

I’ve seen the video. I’ve spoken to the director on the phone, but I’m still no closer to understanding quite what’s being proposed by this latest creative initiative to be launched under Ideame’s creative bandwagon.

Probing a little further over coffee with co-creator, Natalia Chami, it is revealed that “communication is somewhat of a contraction” for this production company, since a secret cover is integral to the immersive experience on offer.

Chami and Romina Bulacio Sak – who’s acting in the show – met on a theatre course during their political science degree and have remained creatively tied at the hip ever since. Both recently moved back to Buenos Aires from stints in London and Berlin and immediately set about recreating some of the extraordinary visual experiences they garnered along their travels.

Injecting the Argentine theatre scene with the visual wow factor and experimental spirit which have become synonymous with those cities’ installational, interactive art scenes, Usted Está Aqui proposes a visually striking, disorientating dream world where everyday perceptions are radically defamiliarised and cast anew.

So what exactly happens? You’re invited to navigate the paths of this surrealist Narnia-esque labyrinthine space and undertake a whirlwind tour of stage-managed spectacle. The theatre might be located in a rustic San Telmo building, but it is, according to Chami, “much more than a place…it’s a whole landscape in which the audience is submerged.”

“Every time you go through a door,” Chami explains, “something different happens to you…you create a new reality.”

Revolutionising the traditional concept of theatre, the duo have projected their own distinct fusion of physical theatre and installation art, with a hint of the improvisational.

There’ll be no paying at the door; nor soiling the series of moving tableaux with worldly cares; nor refusing to participate. Actors are on hand to “set the structure” and guide you through this topsy-turvy world, sure to leave you a little bedazzled, but certainly enraptured.

Neither is there any editing, backtracking, or second takes. Fostering a low-budget playfulness and inter-communal intimacy, each participant – they’ll be 10 per show – is cast in the spotlight.

“You, as the audience, stop being the audience and become the protagonist.”

Not one for surprises? Fear not – while you’re guaranteed to be propelled out of your comfort zone, you’re more likely to find yourself involved in interactive movement rather than navigating your through a stage-managed assault course.

In essence, the project should, Chami assures me, amount to “a constant reminder of the present moment”, of the role the performer plays everyday in our own offscreen drama.

With 93 percent of the target funding raised and the first month already sold out, the Ideame project is certainly straight on track in its picaresque voyage.

So what’s next? A collage text message installation is on the cards for this innovative production company.

Usted Está Aqui Experience opens on 21st April and runs for two months with two shows every Saturday afternoon. Proposed price: $40.

On the eve of Britain’s entry into World War II, Sigmund Freud, a Jew exiled to London from Vienna, is plagued with oral cancer, fast approaching death, and remains as avowedly unconvinced as ever, by the illusion of God.

Enter C.S. Lewis, an established middle-aged novelist and Oxford academic with unparalleled imaginative gifts who fervently believes in God.

This is the sure-to-go-well scenario concocted by the US playwright Mark St. Germain, whose thought-provoking play, ‘Freud’s last session’, debuted in 2009 and went on to win the Off Broadway Alliance’s Best Play Award in 2011.

Now, starring Jorge Suarez as Freud and Luis Machín as C.S. Lewis, Daniel Veronese’s Spanish language adaptation ensures all of the power, humour, and intimacy of St. Germain’s fictional rendezvous remains alive, if unwell.

The concept of a two-man play always invites the danger of coming off static, or lacking in the crises of deceit that rivet our taste for dramatic irony. But here, the thrill and charm are quite the opposite: two unacquainted men are brought together by fame, in a place as candidly transparent as the office of psychoanalysis’ founding father.

What you lose in classical arc is repaid in full with a pervading sense of reality enacted for voyeurs who aren’t even there.

Essentially, what makes ‘La última sesión de Freud’ work so well is its scenery, coupled with the hour of war scenario grounding the encounter.

Freud’s office, tasteful and pacifying, is spacious and grandfatherly, made even more interesting by the fact that Lewis’ visit is not technically an appointment.

Several times, the two men joke about Freud’s psychoanalytic couch, creating a mood that despite their levity has all the emotional investment of a therapeutic meeting risen to confrontation by mutual respect.

It is because of this admiration that C.S. Lewis, in St. Germain’s alternative history, pays visit to Freud just three weeks before the psychoanalyst’s assisted suicide in September of 1939.

Lewis, having converted to Christianity in 1931, feels compelled to debate with Freud over the existence of God. Having read Freud’s work against theism, he longs to understand, from a place both personal and academic, why Freud so vehemently denies the Creator.

Jorge Suarez (who previously starred in ‘Gorda’ and ‘El desarollo de la civilización venidera’, both directed by Veronese) does a masterful job of capturing the wit and erudition of an enervating Freud. More barbed than rigorous, less stern than confounded, Suarez manages to skilfully portray an incredible mind, advanced to the point of accomplished detachment.

It’s still Freud, so he is naturally strident and animated, but impending death and the prospect of world conflagration imbue his character with something very troubled that can’t, however, be troubled anymore.

In contrast, Luis Machín (‘Felicidades’ and ‘Lobo’) portrays a C.S. Lewis who is fleet, passionate, and desperately earnest. Though he knows what to expect from Freud, he comes prepared with counterarguments and holistic appeals to Freud’s uncompromising reason.

As the two men carry on their debate – Lewis equating psychoanalysis with intellectual religion and Freud swatting away God as an infantile fantasy – the conversation and circumstances take multiple turns in subject, intensity, and competitive edge, bringing the men together at a historically fateful moment.

Intermittently, one or the other of the characters turns on the radio to hear the latest war developments, heavily laden with grave and devout overtones.Several times, Freud must excuse himself as his late-stage cancer prompts uncontrollable coughing – complete with saliva and blood – or to answer phone calls from his daughter Anna or the doctor, who is unforgivably late.

Perhaps the most fascinating element of Veronese’s adaptation is the way it calmly engages so many big questions that probably make an overview sound trite. It’s funny in order to be just so serious, but sad in order to be an enduring reminder of a time when these questions defined the future of the world we now inhabit. Maybe even more relevant now than ever before.

Some will object that the canvas here is too broad, or the themes too boilerplate, but they would really be missing the point. What ‘La última sesión de Freud’ reveals, and with great success, is the ultimately social and personal basis of our systems of belief – right down to the loss of a daughter, a friend at war, or the sources of inspiration for artistic and scientific genius.

God, love, sex, and the meaning of life may be suitable tag words for this play, but overwhelmingly it is a display of the walls we build up and break down in dialogue with ourselves and others.