Eyes for a city

A professional theater company, composed of twelve actors, involved the city of Santiago de Cuba and helps transform social reality

The Ojos (Eyes) Project is not about living statues that move when you throw a coin. Our proposal of interaction, whether in the National Meeting of Street Theatre in Matanzas, or in the carnival of Suriname, or a television station in the Bahamas or at the Caribbean Festival, it is a mixture of several different trends of public intervention from the body art, theater, photography, dance...

It has a particular label because it hybridizes them and involves them from the gait and walking, and the use of textiles, plastics and paperboard, which does not look like a doll of a carnival ride or a statue. The visual is different: it takes us an hour at least to prepare the artists, because we use a body primer. And since I do it alone, I have to use the abstract painting to find a flight, degradation of colors, and use other techniques to add volume to the bodies.

We use the own actions of statism: yoga exercises for meditation and breathing; the invented fable stories to recreate with the public. And people create their own story based on the characters: a troubadour may be the Guayabero, as happened in the city of Holguin, but in Santiago de Cuba is Pepe Sanchez or Miguel Matamoros. A blue police leading children, black archangels...

The company was founded in 2008, when I was president of the Hermanos Saiz Association in Santiago de Cuba. And gigantic spectacles were made in the Céspedes Park, when celebrating New Years Eve and the triumph of the Revolution. They had a huge visual display, and all art forms were there; large mural paintings, and all musicians, poets, even the researchers on stage. And we were so passionate that today we are a professional theater company, composed of twelve actors and myself, Alcides Carlos Gonzalez Diaz, better known here and there by the nickname Titi.

Ojos is a project of the city. Santiago is a gauge of how popular, and leaving from here to the country and the world is our great challenge, without losing our essence.