ENRIQUE VARGAS

In 1946, at the age of six, Enrique Vargas started out in the world of the teatre by inventing games in the setting of the Andes in Columbia where he was brought up. He used to invite his local friends to come with him. The children, behind the adults' backs, would head off into the labyrinthine intricacies of the coffee plantations to create wild stories full of images and surprises.

As an adult, his quest now focuses on winning back the spirit of those early 'forbidden' games and on developing a poetic of the senses to endow them with meaning.

His quest took him to drama school in Columbia - The Escuela Nacional de Arte Dramatico de Bogotá - and to study theatre anthropology at the University of Michigan in the USA, and then to create street comedies in the commedia dell'arte style as part of neighbourhood festivities in Harlem to put them on in New York's La Mama Theatre, and to work on Poetics of the Object with Peter Schuman and his 'Bread and Puppet'.

Later on, he devoted 20 years to researching games, rituals and myths in Andean and the Amazon regions with the support of his post as a lecturer on the Dramatic Art of the Sensory Image at the National University of Columbia.

In 1993, together with his company Teatro de los Sentidos, he left the university in order to conitue his quest, not expecting ever to find the answer - for Vargas, the question is enough.