Un milagro en una milésima de segundo
«A work of Art must smell like beauty»
He was a playwright, actor and director of theatre, well-known for his adaptations of classic plays of Euripides and William Shakespeare. He was a disciple of the director Jose Manuel Freidel, born in Antioquia and one of the pioneers of the local dramaturgy.
Velasquez begun his direction career at early age, when he organized small set up’s on the Barrio Florencia of Medellin, where he lived during his childhood and part of his adolescence. The violence of this place inspired some of his posterior pieces, in them is frequent to see gangsters and murderers
He studied Representative Arts in the Escuela Popular de Artes (EPA) of Medellin. In 1989 he achieves joining a work team, that would later on become known as Teatro La Hora 25. Allied with his group he participated in multiple festivals in and outside Colombia and has been awarded with multiple awards, including the National Award of Theatral Direction of the Culture Ministry (2007) for the play Electra of Euripides.
The plays of Farley Velasquez search for viscerality. Some of them may have a humoristic tint like Il Rapsodia diles Toninos and De Dos Amores, but the majority of them belong to the tragic genre. The abundant artificial blood, the complicated lightning, the social critique and the self-questioning at the end of each play, are elements that marked his esthetic.
Velasquez took influences from litterateurs like García Márquez, Franz Kafka, Andrés Caicedo, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud; thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Harold Bloom and Seneca; filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Charles Chaplin and Federico Fellini; playwrights like William Shakespeare, Jean Genet, Victor Jara, Bertolt Brecht, García Lorca, Euripides and Jose Manuel Freidel, among others.
His legacy remains present in the theatre he founded.
FARLEY VELÁSQUEZ OCHOA
CAROLA MARTÍNEZ BANDERA
«Theatre is life itself, the dialogue with that question one is born with».
Actress, master and director of theatre. Graduated from Dramatic Art of the University of Antioquia. Teacher of Corporal Expression and Acting of multiple institutions of the city. Actress of La Hora 25 for more than eighteen years and Assistant of direction of her director Farley Velasquez during twelve years.
She has been part of National festivals in Sonson, Medellin, Bucaramanga, Bogota, Manizales, Cartagena and El Carmen de Viboral. Also in international festivals in Berlin, Hamburgo, Bremen (Germany) and Holstebro (Denmark), among others.
After the passing of her Director in 2015, she decided to continue with his legacy embracing the direction of Teatro La Hora 25, betting on this artistic project and pronouncing to the country and the world the lessons of her Professor. He was immortalized with his play, with his thirty theatre montages, his courses of direction, dramaturgy and acting that make part of Hora 25’s trajectory.
The theatral knowledge and experience that have consolidated in this corporation, allow to offer to the new generations of actors and actresses of colombian theatre, a new interpretation of the Classics of Elizabethan Theatre and of the own esthetic that arises from the Playwright.
All of this has been a fundamental part in the formation of Carola Martinez, who have discovered what is to have a voice and a presence in the scene, by working always under rigor and discipline.
She searches for honesty both in life itself as in the tables of a stage, she searches for the visceral capacity of an actor, which means, the organic compromise with characters, the corporal memory of the artist when he is able to apprehend in his organism the essence of the role interpreted.
Among the referents of the theatre technique and specially the director technique are: Eugenio Barba, Konstantín Stanislavski, Roberta Carrieri y Jerzy Grotowski. Even so, Martínez affirm that the true method should not be understood as a straitjacket; but it should be found not just in the exploration of the physical and vocal action, but inside the creator himself.
On her own words: "Theatre is life itself, the dialogue with that question one is born with. It’s the exploration towards ourselves, it’s the stage created to encounter with all the human beings that are in me. Theatre is not the building, it’s the meeting of wills, of disciplines, of strictness, it’s the encounter with creation, that is no other than the encounter with silence, with those invisible beings with whom you can communicate, that wasted their life doing what they loved, trying during history, to get to know the men and the woman that live in the world".
