XII Edition of the Festival Escenas do Cambio – Revealesence
Revealesence is not a return. It is an emergence.
There is something that insists. Something that, even when it appears diluted or displaced, continues to beat beneath the surface. Revealesence names that instant in which what had persisted in silence becomes visible once more – not as nostalgia, but as conscious transformation.
If in 2025, with Lostopía, we explored in Escenas do Cambio the tension between what was lost and what we were still capable of imagining, in 2026 we have chosen to keep that fissure open within the festival. Not to rush towards the future, nor to romanticise the past, but to inhabit the present as a territory where persistence, revelation and reinvention form part of the same cycle.
There are bodies that refuse to disappear. Bodies that hold memory, that convey experience, that carry invisible genealogies. In Black Box – Unha saga épica, Hugo Torres transforms family history into a living archive; in El Vacío, Julio César Iglesias places the choral body before contemporary fragmentation; and in La Cura, that same company moves through collapse as a passage towards reconnection. These are not isolated works, but rather a profound dialogue on decline and transformation. The void is not sealed: it is crossed. The cure does not deny the wound: it incorporates it as part of the process of rebirth.
Memory, too, is territory and displacement. In Wandering Horizons, Laura Arís and Jakob Jautz transform walking into scenic thought, turning the landscape into an active interlocutor. Cidade da Cultura ceases to be a container and becomes instead a body to be traversed. Within this same activation of space, 52-BLAU opens Escenas do Cambio as an immersive and mutable experience: a body attempting to survive within immensity, reinventing itself according to the architecture that receives it. Both proposals reaffirm the festival’s DNA: architecture as living dramaturgy.
Revealesence also illuminates that which has remained outside the frame. Entrecruzad@s embodies bodies marked by social stigma and transforms difference into scenic potency. The performance Hecatomb II – Movements and Rituals for the Renewal of the World introduces ancestral knowledge into dialogue with contemporary urgency, proposing the stage as a ceremony of listening and a reconfiguration of our bond with the earth. The invisible becomes visible not for aesthetic reasons, but out of ethical necessity.
Within the realm of the relational, La Calidesa transforms the theatrical experience into an act of accompaniment, creating a space in which solitude encounters shared warmth. Fear:less, by Silke Z., explores collective fear inscribed upon the skin, restoring to the body its condition as a real event in a world saturated with screens and distance. Proximity as risk and revelation.
Celebration, too, is re-examined. Este himno llevará la palabra Euforia, by La Intrusa, turns exaltation into a lucid reflection on contemporary emotional exhaustion. The celebration is not an escape, but a mirror. The fall is not failure, but awareness. In a different register, Arder Épica (Capítulo 1) activates the autobiographical word as a collective ritual, interweaving memory, ancestral feminism and community within a shared circular space. The gathering preceding Arder Épica extends this dimension, reminding us that artistic experience begins before the performance and continues beyond it.
At the centre of this constellation stands the Comando Dramatúrxico – not as a parallel device, but as the festival’s living consciousness. It accompanies, observes, writes, translates, converses. It turns the programme into shared thought and transforms the scenic experience into active memory. The festival’s dramaturgy does not merely arrange works but constructs relationships.
Revealesence does not shape Escenas do Cambio as a sum of performances, but as a sensitive architecture in which the works respond to one another. To persist, to reveal oneself, to reinvent – these are not isolated categories, but movements that intersect: the body that remembers, the body that exposes, the body that transforms.
Cidade da Cultura, once again, is not a neutral stage. It is an active territory. Stone, wind and light take part in a dialogue with the bodies that inhabit it. Space becomes an interlocutor.
Escenas do Cambio 2026 does not offer closed answers. It proposes conditions. Conditions where that which seemed exhausted may be reformulated. Where the invisible may find space. Where the void is not closure but beginning.
Revealesence is, ultimately, an act of collective presence. A reminder that something continues to beat. If we are capable of listening to it, it may yet be transformed into the future.
Kirenia Martínez Acosta. Artistic Director for Escenas do cambio 2026