Say 33 - Say Zúñiga, Alvaro García de Zúñiga

In 2013, the Teatro da Rainha presented the play “38” by Álvaro García de Zúñiga.
In 2016, “s/t” and “Remaining calm” were included in “Pensa, logo sangra”, along with texts by Joseph Danan and Gregory Motton.
In 2018, as part of a co-production between the Teatro da Rainha and blablaLab, Fernando Mora Ramos staged “Teatro Impossível”, based on a compilation of texts by Teresa Albuquerque. The latter staged “O Teatro é Puro Cinema” in 2021.

This is therefore a fruitful relationship with a highly stimulating work, both for the multidisciplinary nature inherent in it and for the author's impressive prolixity.

Álvaro García de Zúñiga (Montevidéu, 1958 — Lisbon, 2014), a writer, stage director, filmmaker and composer of Uruguayan origin who is based in Portugal, graduated in music (violin and composition) and was the author of plays, film scripts, an adaptation for opera, several works in prose and poetry.

The multifaceted and multilingual nature of his written production makes any attempt to organize them by genre difficult, however, as these merge and blend into texts of ambivalent nature. Experimental, without a doubt, as always is the best, but also attentive and critical of reality, as well as obstinately playful in the treatment of language.

Since language — or more precisely the languages — is its main working tool, through semantic reinventions in which it deconstructs meanings and linguistic norms through sonic and visual reconfigurations of the word, his work, as Manuel Portela noted, «expands the invention of the human within the intimate experience of language, graphically instantiating its hallucinatory madness».

In 2024, the Portuguese Literature Center of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra dedicated the meeting «A.G.Z. pequenas explosões: leitura mista e escrita composta» to Zúñiga's work, carrying out a creative set of reading hypotheses through principles of collaborative writing.

Presenting a Diga 33 – Poetry in the Theater to the multifaceted production of the poet Álvaro García de Zúñiga will also be a way of understanding in action, through the reinterpretation of texts endowed with an undeniable oral component. It is rarely as meaningful to speak of poetry, a word whose etymological root means to make, create, produce.

The Teatro da Rainha thus returns to this unique universe on a guided tour in dialogue with Teresa Albuquerque, director of the Casa de Mateus Foundation, with whom Zúñiga created the blablaLab association, a laboratory for languages and artistic forms.