JUANITAS

There is a Juanitas in all of us

Commissioned text by Ilse Ghekiere

Juanitas came to life in another performance. Then, during the pandemic, she ventured outdoors, meeting hungry audiences under restrictions and lockdowns. Now she skates back onto the stage—rolling forward on her rollerblades, in all her plurality—into a world where meaning and logic are lost. She moves elegantly, softly, and swiftly— a sprite on wheels. From the dark, a voice calls out: “Are you there? Are you there?”

Juanitas demands attention. Juanita is attention. A wig—a messy blond one, tangled like a giant bird’s nest. She sits at her control desk, an old TV flickering with random numbers, assessing the next move: next scene, next light, next song. Juanitas loves a good song, offering them like precious gifts. Committed to an unknown mission, she radiates urgency — always, always trying to save the day.

Playfulness and urgency, structure and collapse, fiction and reality.

“The world is falling apart!” Juanitas cries out. We listen, but we barely understand. Her oversized, cartoonish pink lips are in constant motion—so much to tell. Words spill out, swallowed before they land, turning into echoes of sensation. Like listening to a James Blake song while running on a treadmill— close and distant, feeling real feelings, for songs made in labs.

“I don’t understand. What’s going on here?”

Suddenly, MacGyver comes to mind—a MacGyver on rollerblades, clad in a snake-skin patterned skirt. Cartoonishly cushiony muscles as attire, because strength is just a trick. The real trick? Holding it together. Being together. That’s why Juanitas is never alone. She is always plural. Like Santa Claus, she is surrounded by helpers—charming but not particularly practical. A family. A tribe of big, pink, plastic lips gathered around a campfire —or rather, the theatrical signifier of one. They warm up. They care. Rough love, unpredictable tenderness—rubbing, roughing, and wrestling in a chiropractor’s version of contact improvisation duets.

Once, absurd theatre emerged from the rubble of war. The world had cracked open, and playwrights like Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet stepped into the brokenness, speaking in circles, repeating, distorting, grasping. What sense remains after catastrophe? What meaning can be made from the meaningless?

Today, decades later, catastrophe no longer arrives as a singular event. It drips through our screens— a constant dripping. A YouTube ad for a TV series about Russian spies invading the West. A news report that reads like speculative fiction. Writers' rooms struggling to invent dystopias, afraid their stories will manifest into reality. AI hallucinations spinning falsehoods, feeding them back to us as fact. The theatre of the absurd: once a way of exposing the nonsense beneath structured reality. Now, being reality itself.

“So much drama!” —Yes, Juanitas, it is.

“Who left the door open? Close the door!” she shouts, then explains: we need to keep the magic inside. Magic, like meaning, is fragile.

Outside these theatre walls, the world is shifting—its parameters of sense and sense-making slipping beyond grasp. WELCOME TO THE NEW ERA OF COMMON NON-SENSE! Boundaries on maps, in minds: erased, redrawn, invented. The already far-from-real economy grinds us into pieces. Politics eats itself up. The internet, flooded with fragmented truths. Meanwhile, Juanita and her gang rollerblade in circles, caressing and slapping our faces with a whim of dancing air.

Rollerblading—a nostalgic speed. A movement both free and impractical, both hopeful and foolish. The 90s. Beaches. Ice cream. Sunscreen with SPF 2, burning to a crisp. Trying to recall a time when things still seemed okay—though they never really were.

Imagine a world on tiny wheels. Tiny, self-driven wheels, powered only by the energy wrung from humans. “If you fall, you stand up,” Juanita repeats. Resilience. What was that good for again?

Piles of cables, always in the way. Microphones—funny, almost obsolete—piercing through cardboard tubes. Tubes turning into light. Tiny smoke machines puffing, farting around. A suitcase rolling, pushed and pulled. A puppet theatre concert with a behind-the-scenes side. A giant tapestry unfurling—like dancing cave paintings of new absurd heroines for an new absurd world.

Theatre of the Absurd: round like a wheel. Beginning where it ends, though chances are, you’ll forget where you began. If there is no sense, no direction—how do you start? How do you stop? Where do you go?

“I am proud of you. You are doing such a great job”

Even audiences, form time to time, deserve a motivational speech. Then, Juanitas asks if we are bored. And surely, there are moments that could be longer, shorter, infinite—moments you will never forget...There are also alway other moments.

Juanitas rolls out of the dark: “At this moment you might have some questions. Do you have a question? Just one question.”

Silence.

“We will not continue the show until we have one question.”

We get a question, more questions. Singing questions. Questions to dance to.

Where is Juanitas now, one may ask. Well—Juntas is everywhere. And there is a Juanitas in all of us—one that bends, distorts, embraces nonsense as a act of resistance. Where AI hallucinates, Juanitas breathes. Where reality glitches, Juanitas glides. When everything becomes ungraspable, Juanitas reaches out—with a hand that may or may not hold us together.