Juan Pablo Cifuentes Benavides - MA Performance
Juan Pablo Cifuentes is a Colombian multidisciplinary artist based in Manchester. He creates live performances, videos, and visual art that explore themes of memoir, identity, and power structures as they relate to objects and spaces.
He employs minimalist concepts and set designs to reinterpret modern Western depictions of male identity by disrupting objects and sociopolitical dynamics on stage. His work centers on the connection between design and performance, where objects build and transform identity through the reinterpretation of their ontological values and semiotics within space. Incorporating photography and filmmaking, he seeks to explore the liminality of social politics, including the dynamics of gaze, tribes, traditions, and memory. By traversing fiction and autobiographical material, he reflects on how our contemporary ways of relating and living are often mediatized by larger political issues.
Teaching drama and performance has been a key aspect of his career, where he aims to provide a design-based model that allows individuals to understand their artistic responses to complex themes and navigate them consciously through their bodies, transforming these responses into resonant stage compositions. Co-creation is central to his approach, enabling students to assess how their diverse backgrounds and abilities can contribute to an evolving body of work—one that is not a finalized product, but a work in progress that reflects their shared experience of a common theme. He has applied this practice in academic settings, offering teachers unique insights into their students’ expressions, creative pathways, concerns, and desires.
His upcoming performance, IN THE ROOM, is the third collaborative piece with colleague Chris Grixti as they establish their new theatre collective, OBOL THEATRE. This collective serves as a creative vehicle for exploring new media, including music, poetry, film, and theatre, in collaboration with other artists based in the UK.
