Flavia D'Avila on La Niña Barro

This month, the award-winning Fronteiras Theatre Lab bring their international hit, La Niña Barro, to Edinburgh's Assembly Roxy. The project premiered a decade ago at the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has since toured Spain, Brazil, Uruguay, and the US. Featuring the original cast, this iteration of the show is impacted not by changes to its content, but by changes to our environment and culture over the past decade.

The piece, performed by Elizabeth Sogorb and Alexandra Rodes, uses the nude body as a tool of physical theatre. "It's very interesting," director and producer Flavia D'Avila says, "Because we didn't exactly conceive of the show to be about [Sogorb's] body, but it was very much part of it. It's not about the body, but the body is very present, and we used the body so much in how we translated the forms, because the text is still spoken in Spanish."

Of the 28 poems from Massé's original collection, only 25 lines of text appear in the show. D'Avila says, "We worked a lot more on translating the rhythms and the images of the poems into physical, visual cues."

The piece is a devised embodiment of Massé's work that explores femininity from a personal, emotional perspective. "It's more to do with the creation of humans than to do with being defined by motherhood or anything like that as a woman. I like to see it more as, 'This is how humans are shaped,' than as being about actually coming out of a birth canal," D'Avila says. 

Resistance against gender essentialism and against a perceived 'universal' feminism have been woven through the project since its beginning. "It's not a 'feminist' show in the sense that it's not militant about any sort of political rights for anyone, really," D'Avila says. "It's more a reflection on that old conflict between nature and nurture – how did we get to this point? It makes you think about where you are at in your life right now, and how we got here regardless of gender, age, or culture." Massé's collection and the show alike confront grief and loss – of Massé's mother and of other, even less tangible things. 

The piece was devised in 2013, while D'Avila was in Brazil. "I had been kicked out of the [UK], and so there was that process of loss going on there as well. The first few workshops we had, [Sogorb] actually fell down some stairs and broke her leg. So [during] the first few attempts choreographing it we had to account for her broken leg, and that just stayed. Ellie's body has always been part of the dramaturgy of the show... There is this idea of shaping and moulding, and then breaking and putting it back together. And this desire is a bit like Pinocchio: she is made of clay, but she desires to be made of flesh."

Early in the show's life, D'Avila had problems programming it in Scotland. Venues pointed to the nudity in the show as reason to censor it, but, after a few years of trying, D'Avila began to "suspect that the problem was not that [Sogorb] was nude, but [that] the problem was that she was big." This pervasive fear of larger bodies has remained a cultural battleground over the past decade, and with celebs (allegedly) removing their buccal fat right and left, La Niña Barro is still acutely relevant, even though fatness isn't central to the piece. Ten years later, we are still trapped – if not more trapped – in a trend cycle that conceives of the body as itself an accessory.

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La Niña Barro, Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, 7-9 Mar, 8pm, from £15