In a world that makes us feel ever more fragile and disoriented, friendship may be one of the most solid ways of making sense of it all. For some years now, friendship has been a recurring question on stage. And, like friendship itself, the question knows no borders. Testimony of that is this piece created in Buenos Aires, in the little theatre that Martín Flores Cárdenas (Marina Otero’s playwright) has on the ground floor of his home. At the heart it all is an actress, Laura López Moyano, who Martín had worked with years earlier, and a text that is a raw and unconditional homage to friendship, with all its limitations and contradictions.

Nothing else is needed to open up and let the theatre bleed out. La fuerza de la gravedad leaves no room for frills or concessions. It barely allows for performance, and even its language finds its beauty in a certain filth and brutality. The play points beyond artifice, at a space that unfolds gradually, like a mandala, and where the endless parade of friends of friends eventually reflects everyone’s relationships with their own friends.

That is how Martín says the piece goes on the days it works. Because it doesn’t always go to plan. And friendship is not exempt from danger or disappointment. In Argentina, as in many Latin American countries, Friendship Day is celebrated on July 20, honouring the date when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon. It’s somewhat ironic that friendship is commemorated on the same day as the conquest of new territory. Because at the end of the day, what is friendship in a world ruled by violence?

For Martín, this piece is an invocation, a metaphysical experiment to rescue our bodies from exploitative relationships and conquest. Rather than representing something, the word acts as a creator of space and reality, as it also does in Extraña alegría by Javier Hernando, and in Shrek, kebabs, i la caiguda de Iugoslàvia by Eduard Olesti.