Portas/ The Doors Project

In Portas, we took the audience of festival-goers and passersby on a journey from tiny to big: from the stairwell of a mini-hosiery kiosk into the larger Plaza de Bonsuccés, and a columned archway that opens onto a park.  Our performance used elements of contact improvisation, ballroom dance, quotidian and 15-M (protest movement) related gestures. Our real-time score of movement and spoken word was also inspired and permeated by architectural elements of the historic plaza, conversations with local merchants, passing vehicles, and passersby.

Portas was commissioned by Festival Lilliput, a site-specific festival highlighting the stairway kiosks particular to the old residential buildings in Barcelona’s city center.

Portas

Commissioned by Festival Lilliput, Barcelona, Spain
Concept and direction: Eryn Rosenthal
Movement: Eryn Rosenthal and Paolo Cingolani
Spoken Word: Sergio Herrero
Dramaturg: Marta Martínez de Aragón
Producer: Patricia Ciriani (Director, Festival Lilliput)
Press: Agnès Font
Video: Inés Scumace, Paolo Cingolani, and Sean Girton
Photos courtesy of Edwin Winkels, El Periódico (taken during daytime dress rehearsal; actual performances took place in the evening)

Press:

Please click HERE for a sample of press clippings from our Barcelona performances of Portas, the debut of The Doors Project (including our page one debut in La Guia del Ocio!). The Doors Project was also recommended by Kickstarter, and featured on their blog in an article by Elisabeth Holm.

Thank you to our 108 backers on kickstarter.com; your generous support helped make this performance possible.

.

About The Doors Project

With The Doors Project, I’ve been taking performance investigations based on observations of transition—political, familial, economic, intimate—and locating them in doorways, thresholds, and other transitory spaces around the world. The series premiered in Spain, and has taken several different forms so far: site-specific performances in doorways, archways, kiosks and stairwells throughout central Barcelona as part of Festival Lilliput; an animated short with visual artist Marta Azparren and Elliott Cooper; as well as a life-size doorframe on wheels—complete with floating door-handle—that my collaborators and I pushed uphill to La Puerta del Sol, the site of massive protests at the center of Madrid that inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S. (photos, press coverage, and more information available through the links above). The Doors Project has literally opened the doors of First Street Green Art Park in New York City, and in 2019 will begin work with Spanish dancer Mari Crúz Planchuelo and Argentine painter Margarita García Faure on a different type of doorway: the horizon.

© Eryn Rosenthal, 2011-13. All Rights Reserved. Please cite with link to this page.