Alessandra García turns the beaches of the Costa del Sol into her stage

Wednesday, July 30, 2025 15:42

It was said that the vision she had worked on for several months was “impossible”. She created a revolutionary performance at the beach with the audience sitting on benches in sand, and the actors swimming in the ocean. She still had to deal with bureaucracy, and she needed permits that never came. She confessed that she had “cried a lot”. She sat at a desk for three days and reimagined what she wanted to do. La Obra del Mar was born, a concept she called “scenic display”, in which the action is spread out over a month and takes on different formats. “Ruins forge the way,” said García, in hindsight. Alessandra has won a Max Award for the best new show. She is also a director, playwright and culture manager.

The regulations may try to stop the playwright from bringing her theatre to beaches, but she has her alternative, her street roots, to fall back on. “I am going to take the recreational norms from the beach and use them to mimic the surroundings and do what I want. This is something I do without permission,” she said. Produced by Dos Bengalas (herself and Violeta Niebla) and the Fundación Teatral Antonio Banderas, Alessandra García takes all the rituals surrounding the beach and transforms them into a theatrical masterpiece outside all convention. García will make art from the ordinary: taking all the gear to spend the whole day in the sun, going for a stroll along the sand, applying sun cream and not wanting to get out of the water until sunset.

Peinar La Orilla, a 10-day performance where she walks along the coast from Manilva up to Nerja is the first part. She will be walking from 1-10 August before dawn to midday and then resting at the homes of local families. She will ask them questions about their relationship to the sea. The journey will be documented by a GoPro camera mounted on her forehead, along with audio.

Her pilgrimage will end at the Balcón de Europa in Nerja. She will then head to Motril, where she will catch a ferry for Al Hoceima in Morocco to start the next stage of performances: Hola es Azul. She crosses the sea to symbolize her restlessness. Her eternal dilemma is whether or not she should leave Malaga. On a beach in Morocco facing the coasts of Nerja and Morocco, she will give a performance of faith. She will do a “performance of faith” in Morocco, on a beach facing the coast of Nerja.

She will ignore the mother’s cry to get out of the water when she returns to Spain. On 17 August, from sunrise to sunset, Alessandra García will not get out of the water. She explained, “That does not mean I cannot ride vehicles such as pedal boats, mats or jet skis.” Playa Virginia, her starting point, will be the place she starts.

Last performance, she returns to the sand. In Playamar, Alessandra García will invite families to an intergenerational performance that claims the beach as one of the few places where families live together “without capitalism getting in the way”. Enterrar MA PA (Burying MAPA) will take place at 7pm on 23 August. They will play the classic summer game of burying people into the sand. In this performance, sons bury mothers, mothers bury grandmothers, and so on. All these performances are completely free.

The experiences are now here. The theatrical audio device La Arena Quema will be available to download from Bandcamp throughout August. You should start the audio device on Playa de la Misericordia between 12 and 8. Through headphones and a mobile phone, the user will be carried away by the soundscape and words of Violeta Niebla and Alessandra García. She said, “And the entire beach will perform for you.”

Orquesografía will also be experienced through headphones: an audio guide will act as if it were a choreographic score from the Renaissance. Each session, 40 people will participate in an exclusive ritual on the beach. They will be creating an ephemeral structure of towels in the sand (at a location to be determined), from 19-22 August at 9am. This will showcase all the “popular wisdom” on how to enjoy a beach day that has been “passed down from generation-to-generation”. The audience will also be able to see how an “outsider” performs choreography in case they cannot stick their umbrella in the sand. She explained that it was an excuse for opening the field of scenic visuals to occupy public places to mimic reality.

This “madness” is coming to an end at the end this month. From 27 to 31 august, the staging will be very close to the original vision she had for the project. The performance will be on a beach, where the audience will sit on towels and chairs that are integrated into the normal landscape. This section, Verismo Primer Movimiento, is a reference to the artistic movement that dominated the late nineteenth century and portrayed in a realistic but crude manner the everyday life of ordinary people. It changed the plots for the operas at the time. The combination of working-class life and grandiloquence is what identifies the work. She said, “I ask for permission from the sea to continue doing this throughout my life. I want to kill what hurts me and embrace everything that comes to me.” She has promised to perform the same combination of performances each August, initially in Malaga, and then anywhere along any coast.