IN SHORT ⟶ Summoning the core of theatre’s primal convention, El Conde de Torrefiel proposes a one-person stage game. The spectator alternately occupies the role of performer and audience member through two elementary theatrical gestures: watching in silence while someone acts on stage.
Se respira en el jardín como en un bosque aims at existing inside a theatre and in the outside world. But a garden is not nature and a theatre is not the world. Gardens are designed so that people can enjoy an organised piece of nature. In theatre, instead, someone places words and images in a composition with a logic of its own. When you leave a garden and enter the woods, as well as when you leave a theatre and go back into the world, the illusion disappears and the world before you is wild again, maybe dangerous, often incomprehensible.
Se respira en el jardín como en un bosque is a performance for a single person. The theatregoer is alternatively interpreter and spectator through two basic theatrical actions: watching in silence as someone acts on a stage. Summoning the primal convention of theatre in use for hundreds of years, El Conde de Torrefiel, proposes a play consisting of a narrative and supported by simple movements. This experience is the starting point for a reflection on the understanding of reality, on the ability to build it – as it happens in theatre – and on the pleasure of watching in silence.
Se respira en el jardin como en un bosque is part of
PRISMA — Twilight Zones
El Conde de Torrefiel in the city of Rome
El Conde de Torrefiel is a project led by Tanya Beyeler and Pablo Gisbert, founded in 2010 and based in Barcelona. Their research has given life to an aesthetic that merges theatre, writing by bodies, literature, sound research and plastic arts in its exploration of the ambiguities of contemporary life. Among their main works, GUERRILLA (2016), LA PLAZA (2018), Una imagen interior (2022), La luz de un lago (2024). Their shows and installations toured theatres and festivals in America, Asia and above all Europe: the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, the Viennaer Festwochen in Vienna, the Festival d’Automne in Paris, the Festival GREC in Barcelona, Short Theatre in Rome, the MMCA in Seoul, the Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico, the Transámerique Festival in Montréal and the Festival d’Avignon, among others.
Tanya Beyeler (Lugano, 1980) moved from Switzerland to Spain when she was 20 to study Dramaturgy and Human Sciences in Barcelona – she graduated in Drama in 2005. She began to work in the field of textual theatre but time and experience brought her close to dance and performance.
Pablo Gisbert (Ontinyent, 1982) studied Philosophy at Valencia University and Dramaturgy in Madrid. He graduated in Dramaturgy from the Institut del Teatre of Barcelona in 2011. In the same year he was awarded with the National Accesit prize Marqués de Bradomín for his text A cinema burns and ten people are burned. In 2013 he was selected for the European dramaturgy platform Fabulamundi – Playwriting Europe.
idea and creation El Conde de Torrefiel
direction, dramaturgy and text Tanya Beyeler y Pablo Gisbert
sound design Rebecca Praga
techinical coordination Isaac Torres
sound technique Uriel Ireland
administration Uli Vandenberghe
production and distribution Alessandra Simeoni
executive production CIELO DRIVE SL
co-production Santarcangelo Festival (IT), CSS Teatro stabile di innovazione del Friuli Venezia Giulia
supported by Mas Nyam Nyam, Mieres (ES)
ph. Lorenza Daverio
