User:Allyouneedarefingers/sandbox

EDUCATION He studied theater at the National Art School and Arts at San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, in Cuba

CAREER In 1985 he founded the Obstacle Theater in his own living room and dedicates himself to the theater production by exploring its possibilities as vehicle. He proposes a self-Poetics in the field of independent creation. The obstacle is not only the raw material with which his theater makes the difference with other forms of creation through history. It is also the foundation that justifies its existence and a catalyst that allows an iconoclast sui generis praxis, one unafraid of the unknown and committed to risk a permanent renewal.

In 1989 the Cuban authorities gave him a place to work on the ground floor of the Masonic lodge "Sons of the Fatherland" in Havana. There, Varela set a permanent laboratory which remained, -until 1997, apart from the official institutions and staged highly controversial works. As Randy Martin wrote in 1990, "Varela is not a product of existing theatrical institutions, rather, he is a response to them"[1] [1]}}

There are three relevant periods in his author and director career: Havana, Cuba (1985-1997); Buenos Aires, Argentina (1997-2002); and Miami, New York; USA. (2002-2016), thus becoming a prolific director, whose theater is increasingly nomadic and independent, standing at the spot where the edges come together most unexpectedly: origin and escape, absence and drama, atrium and diaspora, shape and concept, art and life.

Nonetheless, Victor Varela is credited with contributing to renew the contemporary national and international theater and he is one of the most important world's experimental playwrights today. There is a before-and-after The Obstacle Theater in the history of Cuban drama. His experimentations went beyond other experimental theater vanguards of the 60s, 80s, and 90s and one might even say that such an innovative work taking place on the Cuban stage constitutes a difficult find today.

As an author, director, choreographer, scenographer, painter and theater theorist he shares a personal vision of art that can be placed in the traditions that inspire him: The post-war experimentalism, the literary and philosophical post-structuralism, the ritual irreverence of the independent art and the metaphysical theater. Despite these considerations, his vocation for creation emerges beyond the influences to be placed where innovation and creation are only one concept.

Varela´s literary theory shows what he defines as "An impossible text to be represented" and that some critics have described in terms of "A text that feeds itself out of its own death. A coprophagous text, conceiving its freedom to exist as a freedom on the edges of its own limits"[2][2]}} and "A text that is simultaneously parodic and agonizing as in some tattoos writing."[3]

Varela has been based in New York since 2010 and dedicates himself to painting and theater.