We are a live arts company that began its activity in 2015, when Nico Jongen and Oriol López decide to start together a trilogy aimed at an adult audience: The son’s trilogy (Volumes 1, 2 and 3): Ça va, Ta gueule and Silence. With this project, Ça marche reflects on the transition from childhood to adulthood, the infantilization of the world and the subversive political potential that is proper to the child.

 

Ça va - Vol.1, tells us about the place that the mother figure occupies once we stop being in her “nest”. The piece is presented a few months apart at the Institut del Teatre and Sala Hiroshima in Barcelona. From here, a collaborative relationship with Hiroshima is established, which supports the creation of the collective’s second project, Ta gueule and welcomes Ça marche as an associate artist in the 2017-2018 season.

 

Ta gueule - Vol. 2, wonders how paternal law influences our future. The project gets the “Inuit Scholarship” from Espai La Blanca (Barcelona). At the same time, in the process of creating these pieces we try to deepen the work with amateur performers, wanting to develop in the next two projects of the trilogy scenic  and site-specific devices interpreted and conducted entirely by children. That is why we started long-term workshops with a group of 5 girls who would later be part of the cast of Ta gueule. This research work took the form of a 65-minute piece, conducted entirely by girls, and could be seen at Sala Hiroshima. The nature of the show, working at the same time on the daily life of becoming an adult with a research around an artistic stylization, fit as a proposal for the 10 Senses Festival of Valencia (2017) and a second version of the show that closed the Festival was presented and featured girls from the city of Valencia. Although the piece was already composed, there were numerous of parts that depended on the performer (that we didn’t know before arriving to the city) or that were directly improvised.

 

It is in this same year that we started working in a both play and site-specific, Silence - Vol. 3, the last part of the trilogy, where we put on stage 5 children who invent a story in where they leave their homes. A part of our company moves to Brussels (Belgium) to be in contact with other sensibilities and to participate in the exchange of international proposals that take place in this city. Silence gets the support of Cultural Department of Catalonia and is co-produced by the T.N.T. Festival, Barcelona. The piece takes as a starting point the experience in Valencia and, after a series of workshops in different entities of the socio-cultural environment of the city of Terrassa, it ended up forming a group of 6 boys and girls (and an old lady!) with whom we built Silence. In addition to being able to see themselves in the framework of the T.N.T. Festival 2017, the piece premiered in Barcelona, at Sala Hiroshima and could be seen at the BeFestival ‘19 in Birmingham in July, and at the Teatre Laboratori de Vic in November 2019. Each version was developed with children from the city in where we were going to exhibit Silence. 

 

During the last part of 2018, the company also designed a site-specific (Godmar) with Joaquín Collado, a close associate of Ça marche, director of Antes Collado dance company (Biennale di Venezia, American Dance Festival, Teatro TEM Valencia). In 2019, we also created in collaboration with Antes Collado the show The cave sleeps (with that rock on top), working with 4 old ladies from the city of Valencia and the idea of “heritage”; the show was premiered and co-produced by Rambleta Space in Valencia (Spain). 

 

We are currently in the development phase of  Lo viejo y lo nuevo (The old and the new). A first approach of the research prior to the piece was shown at Escena Poblenou ‘19 Festival (Barcelona). A first approach to the piece, Los figurantes, was shown as a video-installation format at the TNT ‘20 Festival.