Performance
[A SEQUENCE III]
Mario Barrantes Espinoza
- Dates
- Saturday 23 May, 19:30
- Duration
- 15 min. to 20 min.
- Warning
- This performance contains nudity.
“[A SEQUENCE III]”, fragment, 2015.
“Give me a few words for a woman to sing a truth allowing us to build a house without worrying before night comes” - Markus Kutter
Throughout the period of 1958 to 2002, the avant-garde Italian composer Luciano Berio created a series of virtuoso works for solo instruments under the name Sequenza. The third one of this series, Sequenza III per voce femminile (1965-66), was dedicated to expanding the existing vocabulary of what was previously thought as the expressive and technical constraints of the voice, the female voice more precisely.
[A SEQUENCE III] proposes a space where Berio’s traditional directive concerning who should interpret the work and how it should be executed is reconsidered. In this space, it is the figure of the transformista (drag queen) who offers an alternative look to the standardization of score interpretations incited by the academic community and lends an aspirational guise to the question of inhabiting, performing, and mistaking the score.
Mario Barrantes Espinoza
Mario Barrantes Espinoza is an artist of Costa Rican-Nicaraguan heritage, residing between San José and Brussels. A graduated of P.A.R.T.S. (Training Cycle, 2016; Research Studios, 2018), his work activates questions around space, embodiment, and voice, engaging performance as a cross-format encounter. As a performer, he has collaborated with artists such as François Chaignaud, Théo Mercier, Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe, Michiel Vandevelde, and Eszter Salamon, as well as in music contexts with bands including Peaches, The Subs, and the instrumental–vocal ensemble La Tempête.
Currently, Mario develops projects as an independent artist. His end-of-studies work, Drift (I), was selected by various international festivals, including the Aerowaves dance platform (2019). His first full-length creation, El cantar del playo or… a song is a rose is a thorn (2022), received the Roel Verniers Prize (BE, 2020) from Het Theaterfestival, which recognizes creative ideas and new talent in the performing arts. His most recent work, FLESH CAN’T CAN’T NOT’T ‘TIS FLESH H… (2024), premiered at Kaaitheater and is currently on international tour, performed at Alkantara Festival (Portugal) and Theater Rotterdam (The Netherlands).
Alongside his stage works, Mario organizes two party-based gatherings that open alternatives for performance out of institutional frameworks. With APOLEMIA and CULO SHAKING NIGHT, he explores the club dance floor as a site for performance.
Mario is also a mentor and recurrent guest teacher in institutions such as P.A.R.T.S., the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Ghent (Kask), and the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, understanding pedagogy as a reciprocal part of his artistic practice.
Credits
- Concept and Interpretation
- Mario Barrantes Espinoza
- With the input of
- Bojana Cvejić, Bryana Fritz and Fabienne Seveillac
- Music score
- Berio, Luciano. Sequenza III per voce femminile. 1965-66. London: Universal Edition, 1968. Print.
- Thanks to
- This work has been made possible thanks to the support of P.A.R.T.S. and Bâtard Festival