Aquellas que no deben morir is a show which brings into the public sphere a subject which is still taboo: death and its private management. Las Huecas works with the younger generations’ images (often precarious) of the processes of passage.
The show uses a political and poetic approach to shed light on the abuses of the funerary industry and the capitalisation of death. The staging is halfway between documentary theatre and experimentation with rituals, where the performers are joined by Núria Isern, a worker in the funerary sector, and Júlia Sánchez, a campaigner for sovereignty in death. Aquellas que no deben morir is an emancipatory project enabling us to disrupt the conventional narrative of dying, a theatrical experience which critics have described as “something which you can’t name but when it is in front of you, you know you’ve never seen it before’’. The show won the Apuntador 2021 award and the Novaveu Critics’ award.
Las Huecas
The group was launched in 2016 to create stage works from collective practice. It has morphed to include all sorts of identities: ethnographic researchers, a punk band, or comic book artists. It lives in a hybrid aesthetic, heirs to the Catalan tradition of parody and satire, influenced by documentary theatre, dramatisation of visuals and objects, and finally, by the liminal experiences of performance art. The starting point for their work is pure research into the notion of performativity of withdrawal, the vulnerability of bodies, the weak games of theatrical codes, the play of masks of individual identities, ongoing and fragmentary dramatisation, and the abolition of hierarchical structures of creation.
