DESEO
A full-length dance theatre epic in four chapters
Created by Adrián Del Arroyo

DESEO is a sweeping, multi-chapter work of dance theatre that draws on the structure and spirit of epic poems to navigate the powerful, conflicting desires that shape the human psyche. Told through movement, text, orchestral sound, and a layered visual universe, DESEO explores the four primal human longings: Belonging, Pleasure, Power, and Purpose.

Set within a personal and mythic universe, DESEO follows the journey of Gloria and Tiago — two central figures accompanied by fractured versions of themselves: the Blind Past, the Trapped Alter Ego, and the Unwanted Future. Their story unfolds across four overlapping realities, each representing a different layer of consciousness. Each chapter is a descent — or a gate — into the depths of desire, where the very forces that give us strength can also threaten to consume us.

Formally, DESEO charts a reverse trajectory through language and perception. The work begins densely textured with spoken word, monologue, symbolic imagery and character, then gradually strips away the codes of communication — moving toward abstraction, stillness, silence, and light. This dramaturgical arc becomes a metaphor for transcendence: peeling back the noise of meaning to reach something essential, sensorial, and universal.

Choreographed by Adrián del Arroyo, DESEO merges contemporary dance and physical theatre with original orchestral compositions using extended techniques for piano and ensemble. It is staged within an architectural, transformable set — engineered in collaboration with a team of architects — and features a collection of over 85 bespoke costumes that evolve with the emotional terrain of the work.

Designed for large-scale touring and interdisciplinary presentation, DESEO offers programmers a modular yet thematically unified production. Each chapter can be presented independently, or as part of the full evening-length experience.

CARNE. chapterII of  DESEO,  dadicated to portrait our relationship with our desire for pleasure. 

Flesh, but also meat, human meat, the suit for our bones and also our food. Animals and humans together in a word. 

Just a Minotaur, victim and villain, the toro and the torero without separation. The master of ceremonies, and the show himself. Harm and self harm is just one. 

Tiago’s alter ego, in his self-created mind-labyrinth of judgements and egos, debates killing the man he was ashamed to be, to feed the one he doesn’t want to become - achieving what he wants and also what he fears. Gloria, refusing to stand in a past or future where Tiago is fading, walks through the middle ground, confronting Tiago’s alter ego with her own.

In this mental maze, pleasure can heal its balance with desire only in stillness at the centre, where, in the absence of shame, the whole spectrum of human senses can be witnessed and embraced. Embracing the whole self is the only true red thread to liberation.  

Pasodoble, carnations, bull fighting, circuses, gladiators, divas, taste, touch, opulence, misery, beauty, horror, death embroidered with the gold of life.