La Tempestad en Casa

“La Tempestad en Casa” is a collective, virtual and remote experiment carried out in co-production with the International Cervantino Festival, the National Theater Company of Mexico, presented on October 18, 2020 within the framework of the 48th edition of the International Cervantino Festival.
The project included the participation of 18 artists from the stable cast of the National Theater Company of Mexico, including actors, musicians and dancers, 10 audiovisual artists who were beneficiaries of the National Theater Company Program of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts of Mexico, and  the artistic and technical team of the Épica Foundation La Fura dels Baus, which includes engineers, video artists, philosophers, set designers and producers.
In addition, the team included 5 creative collaborators who have worked on the Foundation’s recent digital projects (La Maldición de la Corona and ¿Quién Gana la Corona?/Bodas de Sangre). 

The project takes as a reference the literary classic The Tempest  by William Shakespeare, the common link and the ideal architecture to make joint work possible Reflections on revenge, forgiveness, repentance and, above all, a work related to colonialism is intermingled with a colorful aesthetic that gives voice to the customs and traditions of Mexican folklore.
The original story revolves around the figure of Prospero, legitimate Duke of Milan, who is expelled from the throne by his brother and finds himself on a deserted island with his daughter Miranda after her shipwrecked. On the island, Prospero comes into contact with the forces of nature like Ariel who will help him create an enchantment that allows him to take revenge on him.
This work, which explored the role of slavery and the domination they exercised over the lands discovered by the colonizers, takes up this reflection through a new perspective that combines tradition and new technologies.

Unlike the Foundation’s first digital experiments, the creative participants inLa Tempestad en Casa had no prior contact with Épica, its methodology, and the new virtual performance spaces. Thus, in less than 20 sessions, the participants have collaborated, devised and developed this co-creation that hybridizes digital techniques and live staging. The different videoconference platforms used for La Tempestad en Casa have forced the participants, most of them in a situation of confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic, to take advantage of their own environment, to reinvent the domestic space as a space for creation and to use all their own resources to generate this work without borders.

Once again, Épica makes the transmedia tool Kalliópê. available to the creative process. The first experiments of the Foundation, La Maldición de la Corona y ¿Quién Gana la Corona?/Bodas de Sangre, have made it possible to question the usual processes of interaction in the virtual environment through the insertion of surveys, additional content, interactions on time real and the use of the same digital platforms as interactive tools. In La Tempestad en Casa, the groups have taken into account the creative possibility of having the second screen. In this way, the participants have focused on the search and the trend towards the humanization of the virtual experience. Thus, involving more and more directly the viewer who performs specific physical actions during the virtual show, it has been possible to transform the passivity of virtual events into an experience in which the viewer actively participates.