About the director

María studied at the Experimental Theatre Wing at New York University, where she learned to act and direct, to build a strong ensemble and to create work from scratch.

Once the world of the play and its points of conflict have been defined around the table, the company is trained on the floor. In this basic training she uses methods such as Grotowski’s warm-up circle, Viewpoints, Plastiques and Impulse, out of which grows a theatrical language that shapes the storytelling and movement patterns of the production.

The work begins with body and voice, then moves into the reality and atmosphere of the piece, then into creating the characters and the relationships between them. The text comes in last – by then there is something behind it, and it is easy to learn. This method can be used whether the play is written in advance or born in the rehearsal room.

The main task is to build a bridge between improvisation and script; when that succeeds, a kind of magic happens – theatre of body and soul – and the work reaches the audience on many levels.

When a work is devised from scratch, it grows out of the group’s work day by day and cannot exist without it. The power structure becomes horizontal and the director becomes an expedition leader. María believes the key to a powerful, living production is to harness the actor’s creativity, light the fuse within them and let them flourish. This means taking the risk of keeping the process open until the last day, giving everyone in the group a voice and trying every idea, which in turn give birth to others. Her rule is to talk less and do more. The script is written in rehearsal, and text is tried out as it goes, thrown away, rewritten and so on.

Members of the expedition often feel uneasy on this journey, exposed and in dangerous territory, unable to see where they are going. It is then important for the expedition leader to know that not being sure is part of working this way, and that you have to hold on, keep breathing and put one foot in front of the other. The method is risky and time-consuming, as democracy tends to be, and extremely demanding. But its advantage is that every artist on the expedition is active and has the chance to flourish, and the result is often greater than the sum of its parts.