You are here. In a transitional space, living a private experience in a public space. You are here, in the dark in an arts centre, with nothing to see; you are suspended, floating on a magical element that acts as a boundary between the inside and the outside. You are here, in the liminal zone where everything is about to begin, lone inhabitant of the womb in which this rite of passage will take place. You are here, in bardo or, in Tibetan, བར་དོ་, an intermediate state passed through by the soul on its way to its next reincarnation. You are here. And on the other side, life.

iara Solano Arana (Vitòria-Gasteiz, 1985), is a stage creator and researcher with a degree in European Performing Arts from Rose Bruford College (UK) and a Masters in Performing Arts Practice and Visual Culture from the University of Castilla la Mancha with the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. In 2006 she founded the international live art and experimental theatre company Sleepwalk Collective together with Sammy Metcalfe, with whom she creates performance experiences for theatres and alternative spaces that have toured four continents. So far the collective has received four international awards, two of which have been awarded to iara Solano for Best Actress at the BE Festival in Birmingham and Best Actress at the Skena Up Festival in Kosovo for her celebrated As The Flames Rose We Danced To The Sirens, The Sirens. In 2019 the company was nominated for London's OFF West End Awards with their piece Kourtney Kardashian for their contribution to stage innovation, and in 2022 they are finalists with Psychodrama, a collaboration with Christopher Brett Bailey in co-production with the Condeduque Centre.

Parallel to Sleepwalk, iara Solano Arana develops her work as an independent artist designing relational devices that cross disciplines and that place the spectator as an integral part or trigger of a scenic or exhibition piece, exploring ways to produce fissures in the conventional formats of theatre, dance, film and installation. In 2013 she created Pandora Invite, a series of interactive pieces for Montehermoso, and in 2016 she presented Party, under the name Beaches and in collaboration with Daniela Pérez, an immersive dance piece where the movement is embodied by the spectator's own body. Iara Solano Arana is also a founding member of the Factoría de Fuegos collective, an artistic-cultural project dedicated to supporting the creation and development of contemporary performing arts in the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz, in charge of the inTACTO Festival of new performing languages, of which she has been general and artistic director in its eight editions (2011-2018).

She is currently studying Anthropology and combines artistic practice with mediation and cultural management, as well as other training and consultancy activities, and accompanying the projects of other artists. In 2019 she received the Good Practices Award in the field of creation and youth granted by the Vitoria-Gasteiz City Council and in 2023 she received the S'Empatia Carlo Solinas International Award for an artistic career with a strong community outlook. Iara Solano has been coordinator of the Jornadas Escénicas Injuve of the Spanish Government (2020 and 2021), associated artist at the Centre Condeduque in Madrid (2018-2020), at the Teatro de la Abadía (2020-2022) and has been part of the Artistic Commission of the Corral de Comedias de Alcalá de Henares (2021-2022).