Marta Ortiz

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Galician, Spanish

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I am Catalonian, with Andalusian origins, and I have been living and telling stories in Galicia since 2007, so I an also Galician by adoption and in my heart. 

“This girls has a lot of birds in her head". That sentence accompanied me through my childhood. They said it to my parents about me, sometimes in good humour, sometimes not. It always seemed to me to be a beautiful description of what was going on in my head. I tried to make sure the birds did not leave me as i grew up, and perhaps that is why I tell stories.

I worked in many places and studied various things. I liked literature, cinema, travelling...I lived in various cities until I arrived in Santiago de Compostela. That was where I discovered storytelling. In Santiago it never stopped raining. It rained so, so much that a group of downbeat outsiders began to meet up every Monday in a house, to tell stories and forget about the rain. It was like Dead Poets' Society, but with stories and a lot of rain. Monday after Monday we told stories for the simple pleasure of telling, listening and sharing. The group grew. There were more of us every day, so when the good weather came we took over the Plaza de Platerias in Santiago. There I discovered that the stories were the connecting threads between everything I liked: literature, the oral tradition, cinema, encounters. 

In the Plaza de Platería I also met Brais das Hortas, a musician and storyteller with a head full of music and stories. Brais encouraged me to overcome my shyness and we began to tell stories together, beyond our Monday sessions. 

In 2007 Brais and I formed Tropa de Trapo and began to tell stories with music live. We threw ourselves into it, without a net, leaving everything else behind, and began to tell stories in high schools in Galicia. During the first few years we worked mainly with teenage and adult audiences. Later we also began to tell stories to audiences of families and children. We tell stories in theatres, squares, cultural centres, auditoriums, libraries, educational centres, prisons...

I love to tell stories with live music. I have told stories accompanied by may different instruments (Spanish guitar, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, Portuguese guitar, Arab lute, Chinese flutes, accordion... Brais will have a go with everything!). One of the instruments that has most featured in our shows as Tropa de Trapo has been the drums made from plastic and metal buckets, with which we can tell a story about giants or do some rapping...I already said: we like to experiment and mess about a bit. 

In the Matrioskas show I tell stories with the singer-songwriter Sofía Espiñeira. Here stories and songs intertwine to the point where we have a story-song or a song-story.

I also tell stories solo. I like to tell stories using objects, with rhyme, with songs, with gestures, with simple instruments. I like to be continually seeking and investigating new avenues.

Throughout all these years dedicated to storytelling I have fed the little birds in my head with courses on body language, voice, dance, clowning, social theatre, narration...on everything that I could use in order to fly higher. 

My stories emerge from life experiences, incomplete memories, dreams, where reality and fiction merge to the point where it is unclear where one ends and the other begins. Other times I use traditional stories, rhymes, riddles and poems. Many times they are also ventures into fantasy and made-up madness.

Since 2017 I have been sharing an adventure as founder partner, together with three other colleagues, of "Charlatana Cooperativa Galega de Artistas" for the creation, production and distribution of various artistic disciplines (storytelling, music, children's theatre and circus). The companies forming part of this cooperative are: Tropa de Trapo, Blues do País, Peter Punk Pallaso, Marta Ortiz and Brais das Hortas.

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