Teatro de la Rendija Invites You to Be Part of an Immersive Stage Experiment

Teatro de la Rendija has been pushing the boundaries of performance in Mérida for more than three decades. Its latest project goes further, blurring the line between audience and cast, between myth and lived experience.

The company opens Lenguas de Agua. Butes y las Sirenas this weekend at its venue on Calle 50 in the city’s historic center, with six performances scheduled across late April and May. The piece is billed not as a play but as an immersive scenic experiment — one where spectators are invited to move through the space, film what they see, and potentially become part of the finished work itself.

“Instead of saying ‘turn off your cellphones,’ here we invite you to take photos and shoot video,” said Raquel Araujo, the company’s artistic director and one of the piece’s collaborators. “Those who want to share their footage could become part of the final audiovisual product.”

From Greek mythology

Araujo developed the work alongside filmmaker Oscar Urrutia and musician David Puc, the longtime creative core of La Rendija. The production draws on Butes, a philosophical essay by French writer Pascal Quignard that examines a minor character in Greek mythology — an Argonaut who, unlike Odysseus or Orpheus, simply gives in to the Sirens’ song and leaps into the sea. Quignard uses the obscure myth as a meditation on instinct versus social constraint, contrasting Butes’ surrender with Odysseus, who had himself bound to the mast, and Orpheus, who drowned out the Sirens with his lyre.

For Araujo, the story offers something harder to define than a plot — more of a mood, an invitation to let go of rational thinking. The production, she said, asks audiences to “let themselves be overtaken by the aesthetic experience, by the sound, and set aside the rational to enter the realm of the non-human, of nature and art.”

Two recording sets are installed inside the space, where soprano Cristina Woodward and actors Angie Canto, Eduardo Sansores, Luisa Montoya, and Andrea Arana enact the encounter between the navigator and the Sirens. The audience can move through and interact with the action, or simply watch.

The piece is the first installment of a trilogy called Lenguas de agua, tierra y fuego (Tongues of Water, Earth, and Fire). Araujo said Lenguas de fuego and Lenguas de tierra are in development and will carry the same experimental, interdisciplinary spirit.

“From the beginning, we have worked collaboratively with spectators, and this trilogy is about that — finding ways the audience isn’t just sitting in their seat, but participates, and together we think about how image, sound, and theatrical work function,” she said.

Founded in 1988 at UNAM‘s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, Teatro de la Rendija has been based in Mérida since 2001. Urrutia and Araujo have collaborated since 1991, working across performance formats that range from action art to dramatic theater. Their venue on Calle 50 functions as a laboratory as much as a stage, regularly hosting interdisciplinary residencies, festivals, and work-in-progress showings. It’s part of a broader contemporary arts scene in Mérida that has expanded significantly in recent years.

Tickets are limited. Presale runs MX$120 (about US$6); door price is MX$150 (about US$7.50). Reservations can be made by calling 999-329-1313.

Lenguas de Agua. Butes y las Sirenas

• Venue: Teatro de la Rendija, Calle 50 núm. 464-D x 49 y 51, Centro Histórico, Mérida
• Dates: April 25–26 and May 2, 3, 9, and 10, 2026
• Time: 8 p.m.
• Presale: MX$120 (about US$6)
• Door: MX$150 (about US$7.50)
• Reservations: 999-329-1313
• Seating: Limited capacity
• More on the book: Butes by Pascal Quignard