NOBODY SLEEPS

No Duerme Nadie

Javier Cárcel Hidalgo-Saavedra

Spain

Performances
5 | 6* | 7 | 8 June 19.00
Von Krahli teater, Telliskivi 60a/9, Tallinn
* with Artist Talk

Author-director JAVIER CÁRCEL HIDALGO – SAAVEDRA (SPA)
Co-author DONGBIN LEE (KOR)
Video artist, scenographer and costume designer ANITA KREMM (EST)
Scenography assistant KAROLINE LOHE (EST)
Lighting designer RENE TOPOLEV (EST)
Sound designer JÜRGEN REISMAA (EST)
Song composition and arrangements RAQUEL MOLANO AYLAGAS (SPA) and JAVIER CÁRCEL HIDALGO-SAAVEDRA (SPA)
Performers DONGBIN LEE (KOR), EDGAR VUNŠ (EST), ERKO SILD (EST), EVELYN KANEPI (EST), JAVIER CÁRCEL HIDALGO-SAAVEDRA (SPA), KARL BIRNBAUM (EST), and REBECCA GREEN (USA)

Co-production by CPPM Manifestal, Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Von Krahl Theatre and NO(W)HERE Performing Arts Laboratory

Supported by Estonian Culture Endowment ja JAIK

NO DUERME NADIE is a multi-disciplinary experimental performance blending physical theater, live music, and visual arts.

Departing from the themes of historical memory and socio-political forgetting in Spain, the performance problematizes the “Pact of Forgetting” of 1977. This pact, a political decision by both left and right-wing parties in Spain, was aimed at moving beyond the Spanish Civil War and the repression and crimes of Francoism, focusing on a democratic future under the motto “FORGIVE AND FORGET.” However, it is estimated that in Spain, there are still more than 4,000 mass graves containing the remains of over 114,226 individuals who were murdered, tortured, executed, and forcibly disappeared during the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship.

How long does it take for these corpses to become romantic?

How long does it take for these bones to become mere objects, losing their identities?

How long does it take for them to become “just history”?

NO DUERME NADIE (KEEGI EI MAGA) immerses the audience into a highly symbolic, distorted, ironic, and grotesque historical nightmare born by collective amnesia; a dis-remembering that perpetuates cycles of trauma, violence, anger, suffering, war, and victimhood.

This project has received a Research, Creation, and Thought Award from the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona 2023.

Javier Cárcel Hidalgo-Saavedra (1990) is a performance maker, actor, director, and singer born in Valencia, Spain. His practice plays with the exploration of living voice and alive singing, dramaturgical burning territories, the grotesque, and the research on organic physical action and movement. His work navigates between tradition and contemporary artistic expression. Javier is fascinated by the potential of performance as a means to cultivate tools for developing the performer’s presence, immediacy, and self-awareness in relation to “the other”, be it the audience, the fellow performers, a given context, or the world in constant change inside and around him.

After graduating in 2010 from the International Laboratory of the Actor in Movement in Valencia, he pursued a B.A. in Physical Theatre at the Institut del Teatre of Barcelona, graduating in 2015. Between 2010 and 2016, he collaborated with distinguished theatre directors and choreographers such as Ximo Flores, Amalia Fernández, Stéphane Lévy, and Andrés Corchero.

From 2016 to 2022, Javier worked at The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, where he delved, under the direction of Thomas Richards, into the praxis of the performing arts research initiated by the Polish theater master Jerzy Grotowskibased on ancient songs of tradition and theatre arts. He performed with The Workcenter in Europe and Latin America in Sin Fronteras, The Underground, and Songs of Tradition.