“PÍA is an in memoriam. PÍA is a road movie that doesn’t move. PÍA is a love story that was real. It is a story that will not be told as it happened. It is a play that reinvents a true story. It is something that happens. PÍA was a script before it was a play. It is many recollections put together. PÍA is about two friends.
PÍA is a story for Pía.
This show was built on stage, with the actors work. We started with a sketch of the play and from by rehearsing we have condensed the story and the text. The story is not the central point from which to articulate our inquiry. The start- ing point is ourselves, our most intimate concerns and anxieties as human beings, not just as actors or directors.”

Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, 2005

The initial concern was talking about a real person who had died. Pía Buil Sistach was Gabino’s classmate during middle school, they had a friendship that lasted for several years and Gabino was in love with her, like so many others. She died in an accident. The work was a fiction triggered by Pía, who “had left one day”. After this event, José and Santiago (Luis Rosales and Fran- cisco Barreiro), who live by the beach, set out on a journey to find her. There was a series of formal inquiries that guided us, and the play was created with Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki’s viewpoint technique (or what we thought that technique to be) in mind.
During a period of six months, we built the play through improvisation.

There were choreographic fragments organized as actions or suggestions for actions that served as a mechanism to “lengthen” the present of a situation.
The space was made up of a wooden wall measuring about three by two meters, on which many photographs and various pictures were hung and where Pía’s image appeared in the end. The props were minimal, and the sound work was mainly composed of songs: “Encampanados” by
Jugosos Dividendos, “California Dreamin’” in José Feliciano’s version, “Dos locos” by Los horóscopos de Durango and “El amanecer” by Son de Madera.
In the end, the work was read as a fable of friendship and heartbreak, far from the documentary tone that we began to work on later. The text had a poetic tone to it and alternated between parts narrated directly to the audience and scenes that happened between the actresses.

Dirección Direction: Gabino Rodríguez • Reparto Cast: Fran- cisco Barreiro, Jimena Ayala y Luis Rosales • Actor invitado Guest performer: Cesar Ríos • Vestuario Costumes: Rocio Ben- goa • Asistencia Assistance: Luisa Pardo • Espectáculo basado en textos de A show based on texts by: Elmer Mendoza, Sam Shepard, Eduardo Langagne.

PÍA was presented in various venues in Mexico City such as La Madriguera, Santa Catarina, UNAM, Estudio Ladrón de Guevara and CasAzul. It was later performed in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco. It won the awards for Best Direction and Best Play at the Festival de Teatro Universitario 2005.