Mayte Olmedilla

Everlasting Love

Everlasting Love is a gestural and musical piece that moves fluidly between the languages of cabaret, physical theater, performance, and techniques derived from clowning and buffoonery. Mayte Olmedilla embodies a bride destined to be abandoned at the altar, who, through the cathartic process of abandonment, discovers that the only true destination is the journey back to herself.

“Is love a lifeline? Perhaps self-love.
This piece is a solo and a concert, a celebration and a disaster,
an inevitable freefall journey inward.
You are all invited.
Please RSVP.”
*Fragment from the program

But in Everlasting Love, beyond what happens on the surface, many other forces are at play simultaneously: the biographical connection as an active dramaturgical principle (based on Mayte Olmedilla’s own experience of heartbreak, tied to her maternal grandmother), the creation of a hybrid, multiform physical, choreographic, musical, and gestural language, and the development of a feminist approach that deconstructs patriarchal aesthetics related to beauty, femininity, and relationships. The piece breaks the traditional stage frontalism, evokes elements of the circus genre while intertwining them with concert and theater forms, and emphasizes small-scale, handcrafted production in response to economic and production models.

Everlasting Love activates a layered agency between the clown, the performer, and the musician, exploring the concept of generational catharsis in overcoming social patterns. It restores value to rural life and rural women, highlighting the importance of the grandmother-granddaughter relationship, and considers the ontological shift that arises from the interplay of visual projection and live, physical performance.

Everlasting Love was commissioned by Teatro Circo de Albacete for the XIII Edition of the International Circus Festival of Albacete in 2020. To date, it has performed over 50 shows in Spain, Argentina, and the U.S. It was nominated for Best New Show at the 2021 Max Awards for Performing Arts and received support from INAEM for an international tour in 2022.