About la Saula
Saul Garcia-Lopez aka La Saula is an active performance artist, professor in performance and the program director for the MA in Performance at the Norwegian Theatre Academy. Saula is an accomplished performance artist currently working and experimenting with his/their artistic universe, scholarly work, and living and embodied pedagogies as an assemblage of artistic research and artistic creation. Saula is former co-artistic director (2013-2023) of the interdisciplinary art organization La Pocha Nostra, with around 400 international collaborators in all types of productions such as performances (physical and virtual), artistic international workshops, and writing creation. Saula´s specific areas of development and research interest are related to theater, directing, performance theory and pedagogy including indigenous perspectives, gender, ethnicity, national identities and stereotypes, postcoloniality and decoloniality, and Latin American/Chicano performance art and theater. Saula is currently the research leader of the externally funded and international artistic development project Radical Elders: Transgenerational Performance Knowledges, supported by Hk-dir/PKU. La Saula is co-author of the book La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for The Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society, published by Routledge in 2021. Saula is also the author of A Meditative Rant on the Importance of Addressing Ethnicity While Teaching Eurocentric Performance Methods, an essay part of the book Latinx Actor Training edited by Cynthia Santos-DeCure and Micha Espinosa, Routledge 2023.
Academic interests
Saul Garcia-Lopez, aka La Saula, is a queer multidisciplinary performance artist, Professor of Performance and the Norwegian Theatre Academy, and co-artistic director of the internationally renowned performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. He is dedicated to expose, dislocate and challenge assumptions of embodiment, gender, identity and representation within an intercultural and trans-cultural context. As an artist, pedagogue and scholar, he explores the intersections of the theoretical framework of performance theory and training. From this position, La Saula tries to expose and reconcile the contradictions and challenges of being a creator and a theorist at the same time. His research interest reaches acting, directing and performance theory and pedagogy including indigenous approaches from the Americas, the embodiment of gender, ethnic, national identity, stereotypes and representation, indigeneity, post-coloniality, and decoloniality.
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As part of his professional development, Saul Garcia trained as a Contemporary Dancer and graduated as Psychologist from the National University in Mexico City. Moreover, Saul Garcia-Lopez graduated also as an Actor and Director from the Mexican Ensemble Theatre. He completed a Post Graduate Diploma in Directing at VCA, Melbourne University, Australia and a Drama and Film Honors Degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Saula has presented academic papers at IFTR, PSI, CATR, and the Encuentro of The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. He has vast experience touring with La Pocha Nostra around the world and pedagogically he has collaborated with La Pocha Nostra as a teacher during different workshops in many universities in the Americas and Europe such as Stanford University, Norway Theatre Academy, NYU, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, Chicago Arts Institute, University Catolica de Chile, UNAM Mexico City, University of Wisconsin Madison, University of Texas, University of Amsterdam among many others.
