«Matilde J. Ciria’s direction can only speak of love — for life, for the stage, for butoh, for hunger and desire. Thank you for the courage and the beautiful nightmare.»
Audience review, atrápalo.com
Grotesque butoh cabaret in Madrid
Brutoh Cabaret is a grotesque, contemporary cabaret fusing butoh, buffoon, live music, comedy, tragedy, the obscene and the sacred. Two seasons at La Escalera de Jacob in Madrid (seasons 23/24 and 24/25), every Saturday at midnight. Directed by Matilde J. Ciria. Extreme cabaret: of retching and roaring laughter.
CONCEPT
What happens when three artists decide that 21st-century cabaret must serve reality raw — uncooked, unfiltered, without a safety net? Brutoh Cabaret is born from that question and from the confluence of three urges: Mauro Dicco’s need to connect the popular with the visceral through music; Aisha de Armas’s to reconnect the stage with the sacred and the wild; and Matilde J. Ciria’s to create a scenic space where the vomit of reality is served on porcelain crockery.
The project starts in 2023 when Mauro and Aisha, already working in the transgressive language of cabaret, ask Matilde to direct the show. With the support of LAC 23 (Live Arts and Creation Laboratory), a process of extreme research begins that yields the show’s foundations. The result: a grotesque, contemporary cabaret that ran for two seasons at La Escalera de Jacob in Madrid. Produced by Libertinas Producciones, with the support of Moviendo Teatro, La Escalera de Jacob and Espacio en Blanco.
Our work as artists is to connect reality with the real. Brutoh Cabaret does exactly that: where the cabaret tradition offers sensually naked bodies, this cabaret seeks the extreme nudity of uncomfortable truths. Where others offer entertainment, here we offer intrudertainment. Personal, cultural and political critique in every direction — where not even the cast itself is spared.
PROCESS
Directing Brutoh Cabaret meant building a show that could hold languages that normally do not coexist: butoh, buffoon, blues, performance, ritual and black comedy. The process began during LAC 23 with a deliberately open method: each rehearsal was a mission revealed in the moment, each proposal subjected to an overdose of experimentation until it yielded the questions it generated.
Aisha and Mauro are the bodies on stage. My work was to create the frame where their capacities — she with her sacred animality and her tearing voice, he with his music and his scream — could collide, fuse and explode without the show destroying itself. Or rather: destroying itself in a way that could be repeated at each performance. The original music, played live, does not illustrate the action: it is one more body on stage, with its own will.
Butoh works here as the connective tissue between the grotesque and the sacred, between retching and laughter. It is what allows a buffoon’s body to decompose into dance, a ritual to become parody, parody to become truth.
SYNOPSIS
Midnight at La Escalera de Jacob.
Two beings enter the scene and something shifts. What looks like a cabaret — music, body, laughter — begins to twist. Seduction decomposes into something unsettling. The mockery points in every direction: at the audience, at the cast, at the society that warbles grotesquely while the world writhes.
It is neither comedy nor tragedy nor ritual: it is all three at once, alternating at a speed that leaves no time to decide whether to laugh or swallow hard.
Reality is offered in its raw state — naked, uncomfortable, unfiltered — and the audience does not observe it: it takes part in it.
How far can you go when mockery and good humour fuck con-sensually? Brutoh Cabaret does not answer: it asks the question every night and lets the convulsing body of the audience decide.
STRUCTURE
The show unfolds over roughly one hundred minutes without an interval. It follows no linear narrative structure but a logic of waves: each scenic number alternates between live music, dance, buffoon, performance and direct interaction with the audience. The borders between disciplines deliberately dissolve — the same gesture can be song, dance and provocation. The scenic space has no fixed fourth wall: it appears, disappears and reappears in unexpected places. The audience may come in with a drink. It may not come in with a phone switched on.
ARTIST’S NOTE
Directing Brutoh Cabaret was finding the point where all the loose ends of my career come together. Butoh, clown, direction, improvisation, transgression — everything I have researched separately for years converges here in a format that did not exist before.
The challenge was not to contain Aisha and Mauro but to create the space where their freedom could be radical without losing the thread that connects the audience to what happens. Each Saturday at midnight was a new negotiation between chaos and structure, between the planned and what emerges when two bodies give themselves to the stage without reserve. I wanted to whisper “here we are, 21st century, this is what we humans are” into the audience’s ear while keeping my heart open with plush gloves.
I think we pulled it off.
THE AUDIENCE SAID
«Never, and I mean never, have we seen anything like it. At first the shock is brutal, but little by little you set aside your preconceptions and enjoy the show. Several days have passed and we still talk about it.»
«You can be irreverent and tender. You can be crude and kind. You can be free and loving toward others.»
«I promise you this one is the absolute best. Is it weird? Well, yes, but it’s wildly cool, they take huge risks. As an experience it’s unique, and it’ll be practically impossible for you to find a show that makes you live what you’ll live here.»
https://www.atrapalo.com/entradas/brutoh-cabaret_e4895003
GALLERY
ARTISTIC CREDITS
With the support of: Moviendo Teatro, La Escalera de Jacob, Espacio en Blanco
Classification: Grotesque cabaret / Multidisciplinary
Creation: 2023
Premiere: Season 23/24
Duration: Approx. 100 minutes (no interval)
Rating: +18
Venue: La Escalera de Jacob, Madrid
Seasons: 2 (23/24 and 24/25). Saturdays at midnight
Direction: Matilde J. Ciria
Performers on stage: Aisha de Armas, Mauro Dicco
Original music: Mauro Dicco
Production: Libertinas Producciones
Artistic advice (LAC 23): Arturo Bernal