Judit Colomer and Pau Vinyals: couple's 'striptease'

Tender It's a kind of striptease The emotional space between a couple of artists. "You take up more space," Judit Colomer tells Pau Vinyals. And it's true. He's the table and she's the chair in the living room, we're told. That may or may not be the case in their actual home, but it certainly is in the shared experience of this creative performance they both produced. Perhaps it's because she's a good set designer but a debut actress, while he's a good actor with a notable career. Perhaps it's because she's more emotionally grounded and mature, while he's more playful, outgoing, funny, and likes to bare his soul and show off his underwear. Perhaps it's because, ultimately, he represents the eternally dominant baron who explains how they met without her saying a word, and when she wants to speak, he constantly interrupts her. Perhaps it's because he needs to explain his bisexuality to himself and to us.

Tender It talks about life as a couple. It's a fairly common theme, with peaks like Secrets of a Marriage Bergman, because all couples are similar in many ways and different in just as many others. But Colomer and Vinyals aren't drawn to drama, but rather comedy, so they've invented an autofiction that includes everyday conflicts but focuses primarily on the issue of emotional exclusivity and sexual identity. All of this is treated with humor and lightness and is very much to the liking of the performers' generation, who applaud enthusiastically.

The performance is slow to get going. They've come to present a play, and the preliminaries drag on. Only towards the end does the conflict finally erupt, with a dramaturgy made up of experiential snippets and some external reflections (Paul B. Preciado). The staging seeks, and at certain moments finds, a solid poetics of space with a sense of using silence.