Half philosopher and half choreographer of words, Norberto Llopis Segarra is a centauric performer who has long been testing the boundaries of the stage and theatre. At TNT 2022 he made our heads spin like a top with La doble sesión, a paradoxical but hilarious piece that demonstrated that time can be more deceptive than a Moebius strip, no matter what the watchmakers say. The outcome of his residency at this year’s TNT, he is once again inviting us to understand language and the performing arts as a set of deconstructive operations.

An operation can be surgical, military, financial, mathematical or linguistic, but also artistic, and understanding an operation in an artistic sense might mean intervening in a certain way of looking. Or maybe it means the opposite: looking at a certain way of intervening. Or to soften a look. Or to determine an intervention so that it can be looked at. Or quite the opposite: reality is not rigid and language is the cement that binds it together. Or quite the opposite: language is the best way to dissolve it. Like a sugar cube. And who better than Gertrude Stein to play with words this way. An operation is an operation.

Gertrude Stein is the central figure of this piece, where the text takes on great importance. Not just as a written work but also as a toy, as an excuse to constantly leap from meaning to form, from sound to meaning. “I will repeat things,” Norberto warns us. And repetition is one of this author’s superpowers, stemming from the playfully childlike attitude that she puts into her poems. It’s not about doing something, but to go about doing it. And seeing where it takes us.

This attitude is based on a reflection around gender that we also find in pieces like Gaya de Medeiros’ Pai para Jantar and Range in between by Jou Serra: gender as an operating system (quite literally) that also affects the way we approach art and theatre. What if presence is a masculine idea? What if the concept of action is a patriarchal gesture? From where can we change the way we perceive?