From Benimaclet to Manhattan: Los Teloneros bring their theatre to New York

The Valencian company, which premiered No nos merecemos soñar at Teatro Círculo, is raising funds to stage four performances at LATEA Theatre in October and is also preparing a book about the production.

Amparo Barbeta — València, September 2, 2026

From Benimaclet to Manhattan. The journey might seem like quite a leap for an independent theatre company accustomed to working outside the major circuits and which, as its five members jokingly put it, premieres practically "one play every ten years." But that is precisely the leap Los Teloneros will make this October, when the Valencian company takes its theatre to New York for the first time with No nos merecemos soñar, the tragicomedy written and directed by Rafael Ponce, which premiered on November 27, 2025, at Teatro Círculo in Benimaclet.

The company will travel from València to the United States in October with a ten-person team for its first international experience. From October 28 to 30, it will give four performances at Manhattan's LATEA Theatre, one of the leading venues in the United States for Hispanic and Latin American performing arts. The day before, on October 27, the company will also take part in an event at La Nacional, the historic institution of New York's Spanish community, devoted to presenting the company, the production and the adventure of taking it across the Atlantic.

The move comes at a considerable financial cost, and Los Teloneros has therefore launched a fundraising campaign through its website to help minimize the cost of the trip. Taking ten people to New York and maintaining the production there means covering flights, accommodation, theatre rental, technical requirements, insurance, communications and other expenses that are difficult to cover through ticket sales alone.

"The play is precisely about the dreams we abandon, the lives we imagine and ultimately never live. And it turns out that, while we are telling that story on stage, we are doing almost exactly the opposite. A play born at Teatro Círculo Benimaclet, created by a group of people who very much do their own thing and work with rather limited resources, ends up taking us all the way to Manhattan," says Cora Mateu proudly. "And look, if we're going to make ourselves just a little more precarious, we might as well cross the Atlantic while we're at it and do something we actually feel like doing," she jokes.

A play about dreams

The journey has something paradoxical about it. Written by Rafael Ponce, No nos merecemos soñar combines humor, emotion, absurdity and social reflection to explore desires, failures and that uncertain boundary between continuing to hope and accepting resignation. Its characters want to be loved, hated, saved, recognized, buried or exalted. Beneath a succession of deliberately disjointed situations, at times close to nonsense and Dadaism, emerges a reflection on the lives we imagine and ultimately never live.

And while the characters talk about abandoned dreams, the company is doing practically the opposite: a production premiered in Benimaclet and created by an independent group with limited resources will end up being performed in the Big Apple.

"What if we tried to take it to New York?"

The New York adventure, moreover, began almost by chance. Renaud Frossard attended the premiere and discovered the work of Los Teloneros there. Until then, he had had little connection with the theatre world, but he connected with the production and with the company's story. He was particularly surprised to discover that the group did not even have a website, and decided to create one for them free of charge to give their work greater visibility. A few weeks later, while analyzing where the website's visitors were coming from, he discovered that some were accessing it from the United States.

Then came one of those questions that begin as a passing thought and end up becoming a project: "What if we tried to take it to New York?" The phone calls, emails and contacts with different theatres followed. Two venues responded positively, and the idea began to take shape.

"Before you know it, the whole thing has already gotten out of hand... all the way to Manhattan," sums up Cora Mateu, performer and producer of Los Teloneros.

A company that appears every ten years

The journey also provides an opportunity to revisit the unusual history of Los Teloneros, a group that operates more like a collective of artists who come together and separate around each project. Its origins date back to 2013, although the artistic relationships that would eventually give rise to the group had begun much earlier.

Cora Mateu still remembers the impact of seeing La conquista despacio, by Gerardo Esteve and Rafael Ponce, at Sala Trapezi in València in 1990. There, she discovered a language close to the absurd, in which apparently nothing was happening and yet, at the same time, what was happening on stage felt perfectly recognizable.

Mateu subsequently followed the work of Esteve and Ponce, including La verdad está en inglés, Los pájaros fontaneros, Los hermanos Pirracas en nemequitepá, Los hombres del tiempo and Mala leche, the text for which Rafael Ponce received the Premi Max Aub in 2002.

In 2001, Mateu asked Ponce to write a text for Pildorita en el Nuevo World. Curiously, their first meeting took place at the New York café on Calle San Vicente, a coincidence that now seems almost premonitory. Other collaborations followed and, in 2004, the two appeared together on stage in Cañas y barrio.

The formal creation of Los Teloneros came years later. Following RIP RIP HURRA, Esteve and Ponce's final work together, Cora Mateu and Lorena López proposed to Rafael Ponce that they create a new project together. He agreed, and the collective was born in 2013.

Since then, its productions have been as infrequent as they have been distinctive: A lo Panenka in 2013, Almas de discusión pasiva in 2014 and No nos merecemos soñar in 2025.

Rafael Ponce's theatrical universe

At the heart of the project remains Rafael Ponce, whose career spans almost four decades. His texts unfold through seemingly disconnected phrases, abstract situations and a constant succession of events that dispense with traditional narrative construction.

Yet this apparent chaos is threaded with references to the present day, recognizable songs, allusions to the theatrical profession itself, humor, criticism and irony. No nos merecemos soñar takes this language into a production that moves between the absurd, the musical and the Dadaist.

On stage are Alba Serra, Begoña Tena, Cora Mateu, Manuel Ruiz Arteche and Marian Villaescusa, while Carlos Molina, of Lumierescene-Tinglados Visuales, and Juan Sebastián López Galeano, of Space Circles, develop the production's visual universe and dramaturgy.

For Los Teloneros, Cora points out, the New York performances therefore represent something more than a tour. They offer the possibility of building a bridge between Valencian theatrical creation and American audiences, and of demonstrating that an independent production can find a life beyond conventional circuits.

The project will also have a second life beyond the stage. Los Teloneros is preparing a book that will bring together Rafael Ponce's complete text, his original drawings and illustrations, archival photographs and contributions from various guest writers and artists.