Álvaro García de Zúñiga

Born in 1958, Montevideo, Uruguay, Álvaro García de Zúñiga lives and works in Portugal. A formally trained musician (studied composition under Roque de Pedro, and violin under Sergio Prieto, Alberto Lysy and Norbert Brainin), whom musical theatre led to theatre tout court, and then to other literary forms. He has written various theatre plays (“Actueur”, “Théâtre Impossible”, “Le Théâtre n'est que du Cinéma”, “Lecture d'un texte pour le théâtre”, “Manuel on Stage”, “Exercices de Frustration”, “radiOthello”), screenplays for film and television (“Gambito”, “Deux histoires à des fins purement…”, “Voyage au but de la nach Pina Bausch”), acoustic pieces (“Logicus and Philosophicus”, “Canções Bioil(l)ógicas sem Aditivos”) and various prose and poetry works (“História de Pájaros Matemáticos, Déchet, Peaux et Scies, Erections”).

Writing eventually led him to stage direction (“Press Conference”), cinema (“Um Dia na Vida”, “Palais de Santos”, “Batalhas”, “K-Lear”) and radio drama (“Manuel”, “Corpus Delicti”, “OtihOrih”). For Álvaro García de Zúñiga languages constitute the raw materials of his creation – a musical, visual language, a language that is invented, destroyed and reconstructed, generating multiple sounds/meanings; a language devoid of any specific nationality, which enjoys combining itself with other languages and reversing linguistic conventions; an elastic language in which norms are not mandatory and differences are welcome; a language that is foreign, logical and sonorous.