Lake Studios Berlin

This residency research focuses on the creation of the two main characters of a site-specific performance inspired by Aesop’s fable The Ant and the Cicada. The work explores the possibility of developing a new dramaturgy that reimagines this well-known fable through a contemporary lens.

During the residency, Luis will work in collaboration with Sabrina Martemucci on the creation of the two main characters, exploring not only their movement qualities, but also their physicalities: what defines each body, what drives it, what limits it, and how it relates to the other.

The Ant and the Cicada are approached not simply as figures from a fable, but as two living archetypes that continue to inhabit the contemporary body. The research will investigate what characterises each of them physically, emotionally, and dramaturgically: the Ant as a body shaped by structure, labour, discipline, survival, and responsibility; the Cicada as a body moved by instinct, voice, desire, fragility, pleasure, and the need to exist beyond productivity.

A central part of the work will be the relationship between these two worlds: how they observe, resist, contaminate, mirror, and transform each other. Through their interaction, the project aims to develop a deep dramaturgical rewriting of Aesop’s well-known fable, moving beyond a moral opposition between work and idleness. Instead, the research starts from the belief that both archetypes live within each of us, and that the real question is how these two forces can coexist, collide, and eventually search for a fragile form of balance.