Rebota, Rebota y en tu cara explota

Bounces bounces and explodes in your face
(Spanish children’s rhyme)

The performance Rebota, Rebota y en tu cara explota (Bounces bounces and explodes in your face) by Agnés Mateus and Quim Tarrida is an uncompromising statement on violence against women and on a society that has grown accustomed to it. The starting point of the piece is a set of alarming statistics: in Spain, two women on average per week are killed by their husbands, former partners, friends, or fiancés. Yet these numbers are not perceived as a call to action; instead, they dissolve into the background noise of everyday news. A minute of silence, a brief surge of outrage, and life goes on. This theme is equally urgent in the Czech context. In 2023, women accounted for 73% of victims of murders committed by intimate partners and for half of all victims of domestic homicides. Despite this, femicide (the killing of a woman because of her gender) remains a phenomenon that is rarely named in Czech public discourse. Such acts are often reduced to “family tragedies” or individual failures, obscuring their structural nature and the long-term patterns of violence, control, and sustained psychological and physical pressure that underpin them.

The creators of the piece are driven by the belief that we should not be able to go on living as if nothing were happening while we celebrate football victories, consume the plastic we ourselves feed to fish, sell apartments at prices we cannot afford, and protest the consequences of our own actions. As the world spins on, women are systematically killed, threatened, and assaulted, yet are still forced to defend, explain, and justify their very existence. This performance does not confine itself to the mere theme of women’s murders; it excavates the deeper layers of the problem: the language, the images, and the stereotypes that shape the female body across theater, film, and popular culture. On a non-pop stage, under the assault of deafening techno, Agnés Mateus stands alone. Glittering pants shimmer like a cabaret show while she unleashes a torrent of insults and degrading labels hurled at women every day. Words we normally pass by unnoticed accumulate, repeat, and weigh heavy until they become a physical experience, a bruising echo on the body itself. Mateus’s performance is unrelenting, relentless, and intense. Humor and irony act as bait, slowly dissolving into anger, helplessness, and despair. The piece rejects euphemism, insisting on naming things with their true names: women do not “die,” they are killed; violence is not an aberration, it is the outcome of a system; murder, abortion, blood, and vomit are not abject, staying silent is. The audience is confronted with its own passivity, its own overlooking, and its own quiet complicity.

Rebota, Rebota y en tu cara explota is not a performance that offers comfort. It’s an explosion that bounces off the audience, coming back with full force like a boomerang and striking squarely in the face. It reminds us that violence against women is not a problem happening somewhere else or an exception. It is part of the reality we actively co-create. It poses an urgent question: How many shocking blows will it take for us to finally speak up?

The piece won the 2017 Critics’ Award for Best Performance in the New Trends category, the FAD Sebastià Gasch – Aplaudiment in 2018, and the Audience Award Premi Butaca 2018 for innovative scenic approaches. It was also selected as an Honorable Performance at the Teatro de Almada Festival in 2021.

“It’s an energetic, raw, and ironic performance that forces the audience to respond. One minute we’re laughing, the next we’re enraged. It leaves you with the sense that life is not only tragedy and that action is necessary. That’s the power of this performance.”
France Bleu / Radio France

“It links gender inequality and physical violence against women with relentless precision. Agnés Mateus drags the audience through a series of uncompromising monologues where humor and self-irony gradually give way to chilling urgency. The final images, where the performer exposes her own body to real danger, give her words tangible weight.”
The New York Times

“The creators reject the comfortable passivity of the audience gaze. The goal is not simply to inform, but to shake the audience out of their comfort zone, to confront them, and to force a clear reckoning with the reality of violence against women. No one will walk away from this performance the same.”
Festival de Almada

Agnés Mateus studied journalism at the University of Barcelona and trained in theater under Txiqui Berraondo and Manuel Lillo, weaving together acting and dance in a seamless apprenticeship of the body and voice. A defining moment in her career came in 1996 with the founding of the collective General Eléctrica, where she remained a key member for eight years. As a performer and multidisciplinary artist, she has collaborated extensively with some of the most prominent figures of the contemporary European scene, including Juan Navarro, Roger Bernat, Rodrigo García, and Simona Levi. In her own authored and directed work, she navigates the liminal space between performance, theater, and visual art, exploring the edges where disciplines dissolve and converge. Together with visual artist Quim Tarrida, she created a series of works including Patatas Fritas Falsas, performed in 2022 at the National Theatre of Catalonia. Her work is marked by a powerful physicality, radical openness, and a relentless focus on the personal and social responsibility of art.

Quim Tarrida is a multidisciplinary artist operating at the intersection of neo-pop aesthetics and conceptual art. Since the mid-1980s, when he began drawing comics and building his own imaginary world Mundo Subcutáneo, he has systematically developed a distinct visual language where motifs of lost childhood, fascination with toys, comics, and the experience of horror vacui intertwine. Alongside visual art, he has long been devoted to sound art, performance, and contemporary music. In parallel, he cultivated a career as a creative and artistic director in advertising agencies, design studios, and interactive communication projects. He is the founder of the platform SubCutaSpoon, dedicated to the production and distribution of art objects and art toys, and the recipient of the Catalan National Culture Award in 2007. In recent years, he has worked closely with performer and director Agnés Mateus as co-director and creator of the audiovisual components of their performances.

Performance Runtime: 75 minutes without intermission
Language: Spanish, Czech surtitles
Audience Advisory: strobe lighting is used in the performance
Recommended for audiences 16 and older

Creators and Directors: Agnés Mateus and Quim Tarrida
Performers: Agnés Mateus, Pablo Domichovski
Audio and Video: Quim Tarrida
Lighting Design: Laura Morin
Technical Team: Laura Morin and Quim Tarrida
Co-production: Festival TNT – Terrassa Noves Tendències 2017, l’Antic Teatre (Barcelona) and Konvent Punt Zero (Berga)
With the support of: La Poderosa, Nau Ivanow and Teatre La Massa (Vilassar de Dalt)
Special thanks to: Ismael Mengual, Gabriela Oyarzabal, Semolinika Tomic, Bcn Props, Annabel Barrufet, CUBE, Conrado, Martí Soler, the Konvent family, Maria Mateus, Joaquim Gil, Esther Soldevila, Carles Fígols, La Caldera

The performance is part of 4 + 4 Days in Motion festival and the NONviolence Festival.