Teatro del Sótano in Barcelona/Spain. Annie O’Callaghan in Conversation

Annie O’Callaghan is an actress, author, director, educator, and producer with Irish-Venezuelan roots. She studied social communication and audio-visual arts at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, and as she had already been playing theatre from an early age, she got involved with the university’s theatre company, Teatro UCAB - which she came to co-direct after graduating, while also teaching drama history, scenic arts, scriptwriting and directing at the university. “I worked with different professional theatre companies in Venezuela as well, acting, directing, producing, even taking care of technicals. I really enjoyed the global theatre making, the whole of it, the total art.” Teatro UCAB is mainly oriented towards developing theatre as an educational tool for communities, so the company could also travel inland into Venezuela, sometimes into very isolated communities, and do shows and theatre workshops there. “In the company we also believed that you could be the main protagonist in one show, and in the next show you could be doing the lights. Everybody is needed, but nobody is central - this taught me how every little piece of the machine is important. And that always very much stayed with me.” 

Annie subsequently moved to Barcelona to train in immersive theatre with Teatro de los Sentidos. “They did, for instance, installations where audience members walked in as a ‘traveller’, came to different chambers, and co-created a story around their own journey.” Annie stayed in Barcelona where she worked with theatre companies such as Jocular Theatre, IPA Productions, Escapade Theatre, and Barcelona Improv Group. In 2019, she founded her own company, Asociación de Investigación Artística Teatro del Sótano, a non-profit association dedicated to artistic research and the development of socially-aware theatre expression through collective creation. “It all started by realising there were a lot of migrants from Venezuela in Barcelona, and among them a lot of my ex-students and ex-colleagues. I love matchmaking, so I gathered people whom I knew for a long time and mixed them with people I knew from Barcelona. Our first production, with people from Ireland, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Spain, USA and Venezuela was called Irse, Leave - it was all about our stories of immigration.” 

While Annie is slowly building up Teatro del Sótano, she has also helped to start another company called Camp Fire Theatre, dedicated to bring high quality theatre in English to schools, and she is engaging in the BCN Studio project, aiming to build a physical theatre space that can host different types of performing arts. When working in a network, digital tools are indispensable for communicating and collaborating, but they also offer new opportunities for artistic expression. “When the COVID pandemic kicked in, we were producing Irse, and we were suddenly locked in - we started meeting on Zoom, and we decided to experiment with 360 degree video, so we continued with the play in the round. We then did the staging live with the characters on stage in a circle, and the idea was that as an audience member you could decide which character to follow, so it also was an experience to choose what you hear and what you see.” Teatro del Sotano did a festival of virtual theatre, Caja Negra, in 2020, and also started to explore the intersection between film making - the shots, the lightning, the camera angle and so forth - and the live element. So the performance in its composition took on the character of editing a film live. “And the actors were mixing their performance space with their personal space, because it was everyone’s own house. In fact, we have a poetic film of the final product.”

In their contribution to gLOKALE 2024, Teatro del Sótano will show a shorter version of the Irse script, dealing with migration and the memory of objects, adapting it to the virtual format. “When you have to leave your home, what do you take with you? What significance will these objects have once they are isolated from their former context, and what significance will objects have that stay at your former home?” When Annie went back to Venezuela, she found a box with baby teeth that her mother had kept in a drawer, and didn’t know what to do with it. Objects of that kind can be turned into something else, transformed into poetry, and they typically end up in the basement - a place where you put things that have nowhere else to be. 

“In the play, two actresses who represent two versions of one same person (before and after leaving), open boxes in a basement, talk about the things that come into view, and with each thing, a window will open in different parts of the world, and our participants will respond live online – they will show photos, views of their surroundings, and they will also have some lines to talk or to recite, they will be able to create their own composition.” These windows are puertas portátiles, portable doors, and the idea is that the audience sees the memories contained in an object, and along with this the places that a person is carrying in their heads. Some scenes will be in Spanish, others in English, reflecting the essence of a group which is multinational. “What we do is poetic also in the sense that poetry allows people to come in - everybody has a space, and even if they don’t understand everything, there is something that they will catch.“ The play will be shown and streamed live on the Digital Stage, all the audience will take part online, and in order to allow for interaction, a subsequent discussion will invite everyone to come in with their comments, questions and ideas.

Looking beyond the gLOKALE 2024 event on September 28, Annie sketches some long-term perspectives for Teatro del Sótano. The group just developed a new show called Dieron las 13, The Clock Struck 13, which is about the feminine and masculine energies, exploring new archetypes of masculinity and femininity. “We use theatre to think, and we aim to come up with stories with which we can bring the audience into an interaction with topics that are relevant to everyone. We will further explore mixed media in connecting people and locations. The more we collaborate, the better for everybody - I think this is where the magic is, not in doing stuff for yourself.” We are looking forward to future developments and new collaborations.