“Empezar un Mundo, Subir a una Cumbre” is a theatre workshop led by Spanish playwright and director Alberto Cortés, which looks at writing for the stage as an act of insight and risk. During the workshop, Cortés suggests scaling invisible peaks, giving body to that which does not exist, and investigating alternative forms of worldbuilding — not with bricks or certainties, but with words, gestures and affectations.
Drawing on practices developed during his recent projects, Cortés works with the idea of the world as a poetic and political construction. His queer approach to performance rejects predictability and grounds itself in shared intimacy, in the relation with the spectator as an accomplice and lover, and in an act of listening to what is yet to come. “Starting a world” is not to raise a building, but to break ground. Climbing a peak is not to reach the summit, but to find new ways of seeing.
In this intensive workshop across two days, participants are invited to try out dramatic tools that operate between the visible and invisible, the real and the imagined. This is a space where methods, references and normative structures are all decentred.
Alberto Cortés, who is one of the most prominent figures on the Spanish scene, proposes a practice of displacement: a radical diversion from the known, towards stage writing as an impulse of enchantment. An invitation to write the world with empty hands and eyes wide open.
