Only Alberto Cortés can combine the Andalusian beaches and the forests of German romanticism in the same piece to show us how the trees painted by Friedrich conceal thousands of cruising bodies. All natural landscapes are full of couples who have gazed at them or who have argued, wept or screwed in them. Or, as Alberto says, “landscape is a boxing ring where many things happen with love.” Such is the premise of Analphabet, which Alberto says is a ghost that appears to couples who are sad in a place of great beauty. But who are these ghosts?

Analphabet was conceived during a residency at the TNT, born out of the need to heal the battered body after a sentimental breakup has left a wound that probably has much to do with the construction of the couple as an artefact. Little is said about the shadows and abuses present in same-gender relationships, perhaps as little as is said about the self-exploitation and damage to the health involved the performing arts.

Two crises converge in Analphabet: that of Alberto as a lover and that of Alberto as a performer, with his romantic relationship with the audience. So, we should not expect to again be objects of the steamy, intoxicating courtship that he offered us in One Night at the Golden Bar (TNT 2022). In this case, vulnerability, melancholy and torment come together in a more sober piece than ever, where poetry weighs heavy and sets the pace of the show.

Accompanied by Luz Prado’s violin, Alberto is as skilled at setting poetic traps as he is at turning grief into a radiant act. Just as Katerina Andreou, Rosa Romero, Núria Corominas and Gaya de Medeiros use different strategies to ward off pain, Alberto knows how to twist words around to restore the landscape’s full beauty and vitality that painful memories seem to have taken from it. The same kind of theatrical austerity that resonates in La luz de un lago by El Conde de Torrefiel.