ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces Spatial Dramaturgy as a contemporary theatrical language developed within the practice of Manifesto Poetico, grounded in more than twenty-five years of artistic and pedagogical research by Carlos García Estévez and Manifesto Poetico’s artistic team. Spatial Dramaturgy understands space not as a neutral container, but as an active co-creator that shapes movement, perception, and meaning in continuous dialogue with the performer and the collective. Training and creation are conceived as practices of listening, through which scenic action emerges from attentiveness to spatial forces, rhythms, tensions, and relationships.

The chapter articulates this methodology through three interconnected dimensions. First, The Elastics: An Ecosystem of Structures is presented as a physical and conceptual tool that renders space tangible, enabling performers to explore gravity, time, and collective composition through principles of Tensegrity. Practically, The Elastics are a network of tensioned bands that performers engage with—stretching, leaning, and navigating them—to make spatial forces like gravity, balance, rhythm, and collective composition tangible. Second, Elemental Spatial Patterns—Point, Line, Diagonal, and Circle—are described as pre- expressive, embodied structures that organize perception, movement, and relational awareness across cultures, rituals, and collective behaviors. Third, Performative Patterns are introduced as the organic dimension of Spatial Dramaturgy, informed by the dynamics of nature and emerging from recurring spatial situations to guide decision-making in the present moment without reliance on predetermined narratives or techniques.

In dialogue with Indigenous collaborative creation processes—such as the work developed with Anishinaabe artists and Elders from Manitoulin Island (Wikwemikong, Canada)—Spatial Dramaturgy aligns with non-Western worldviews in which space is relational, land-based, and animated by ancestral presence, collective memory, and lived experience.

Central to this research is the mask, understood as both an ecosystem of forces and the origin of Spatial Dramaturgy. From individual mask work to the notion of a collective mask, the chapter situates Spatial Dramaturgy within an anthropological and ecological perspective, redefining performer training, collective creation, and the role of the audience as co-creator. Ultimately, Spatial Dramaturgy is proposed as a living, transdisciplinary language through which body, space, and collective imagination actively generate meaning.