SOCIETAT DOCTOR ALONSO, directed by Tomàs Aragay (director and playwright) and Sofía Asencio (dancer and choreographer), has built a language whose fundamental key lies in the concept of displacement. Putting something outside its place, scope, or proper space, investigating how this displacement modifies language, both in its constitutive grammar and in the reading by those who observe: displace to reveal. This maneuver has proven effective in generating spaces of poetic discourse that question the status quo of our understanding of reality.

Tomàs Aragay is a playwright and actor. He studied Directing and Dramaturgy at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona. In 1996, with Roger Bernat, he founded the creation center General Elèctrica in Barcelona, which closed in 2000.

Although trained in theater, since his first piece, “Cruza cuando el hombrecito está en verdeˮ (1997), created with Laura Arís, Sofia Asencio, and Nathalie Labiano, and awarded the First Prize for Choreography at the XI Certamen Coreográfico de Madrid, he has worked with people from dance. His starting point in approaching dance is free of constraints; not being a dancer, he speaks of it from another place, more from emotions than from movement. That is why his shows move us and do not leave us indifferent. He received the Prix dʼAuteur at the Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint- Denis, with the creation John Kovach, state of emergency (Festival dʼEstiu Grec-99, Barcelona). He has maintained a constant research focus, on the one hand, studying the relations among the different expressive weapons he mixes in his shows — movement, word, and music — and, on the other, studying how to integrate in the performer the awareness of their creative potential beyond technique. He has taught courses at the University of Fine Arts of Perpignan, Festival Dansem in Marseille, Festival Nouvelles de Danse in Pau, Festival  Dies de Dansa in Barcelona, Festival Enzimi in Rome, Festival Mladi Levi in Ljubljana, and at Festival Mira in Toulouse.

Sofía Asencio is a choreographer, dancer, and performer who worked for 10 years with several companies with whom she toured worldwide. Between 1989 and 1993 she studied contemporary dance at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona while participating in a musical revue. Later, she worked with Vicente Sáez, LʼAnonima Imperial, Mudances and Cía. ACTA, and in 1998 she joined the collective General Eléctrica. In 2000, together with Tomàs Aragay, she created Societat Doctor Alonso, a company and platform for research and production of shows in collaboration with other artists and researchers. As a context generator, she co-directed the MAPA Festival between 2004 and 2010 and co-curated Salmon between 2021 and 2022. She currently participates in the activities of El Consulado, a space for live arts in Horta Sud, Valencia.

https://doctoralonso.org