Tiburón

The life of José María de Barahona is the result of the sudden growth of Europe that began in the mid-15th century. At the end of the era of the great epidemics, Europe discovers that it is not alone in the world, it discovers that there are other worlds. Empires of dimensions that they had not been seen in the last thousand years. And then, that continent orders its supremacy and deploys a policy that confuses everything: glory with holiness, insensitivity with repentance, virtue with ecstasy, and the subject with the object.

“This project is part of an attempt to discover other ways of understanding the world. For trying to get closer to schemes of thought that had been developed from other cultures, who coexist in what has come to be called Mexico”.

Lagartijas Tiradas al sol 2019

In this work, the actor and stage director Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez evokes the journey undertaken in the 16th century by the evangelizer Fray José María de Barahona, who traveled from Seville, Spain, to Tiburón Island, in the state of Sonora, Mexico. In order to propose a dialogue between the colony and the present, the academy and the theater.

In August 2019, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez decided to write his thesis in Anthropology on the encounter between José María de Barahona and the Tokáriku. From a «reenactment» he try to recreate the experience that Barahona lived 500 years before in the same territory.
During his time on Tiburón Island and his encounter with the island’s inhabitants, his understanding of the world changed radically .

These two voyages, the one of Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez in 2019 and the one of the evangelizer in the 16th century, articulate the proposal
and create a framework to investigate the three themes on which the project gravitates:

1- The relationship that Mexicans that live in cities have with the past and present of the towns called «indigenous» and who were encapsulated within the territory that makes up the current Nation State.

2- The ethical and historical implications of the colonization processes and their co-narration in the anthropological approach.

3- Acting as a mechanism of knowledge and fiction as instrument to negotiate with reality. How far is acting something is living it? Why do we still regard fiction as subject to reality?

Tiburón is based on texts and ideas by the Argentine writer Juan José Saer, the Mexican academic Elisa Ramírez Castañeda, the writer César Aira, the anthropologist Rosana Guber, the journalist Fernando Benítez, the Mexican anthropologist Olivier Debroise, the Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig and the English anthropologist Nigel Barley among others.

The work has been presented at the Madrid Autumn Festival; at the Temporada Alta Festival in Girona, Spain, as well as at the Zurcher Theater Spektakell, in Zurich, Switzerland, Vidy in Laussane, Theater Jean Vilar, Paris, La Vigente Montpellier among others.

Actuación y coordinación: Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez. Dirección adjunta: Francisco Barreiro. Diseño de espacio y luz: Sergio López Vigueras. Dramaturgista: Luisa Pardo. Video y asesoría artística: Chantal Peñalosa. Diseño y realización de telones: Pedro Pizarro. Diseño de sonido e imagen: Juan Leduc. Producción ejecutiva: Mariana Villegas. Multimedia: Carlos Gamboa. Producción: Zurcher Theater Spektakell, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol y Teatro UNAM.