TFAI — International Theatre
TFAI — Taller de Formación Actoral Integral (Integral Actor Training Workshop) — is a full-fledged arts company devoted to performance training, creation, and research, founded by artist Héctor Cabrera in Mérida, Venezuela, in March 2014. More than a school, it is a living ecosystem where art isn't only taught: it's experienced, lived, and turned into human language. Its motto says it all: "We create art, we unite cultures."
Origins, among the mountains
TFAI was born among the Andean valleys as an answer to a deep need: to train integral actors capable of inhabiting art as a way of life. Héctor Cabrera built it with the constant support of maestro Ronald David Rojas Faramalla and a team of artists and teachers — Luis Alfonso Rodríguez Carrero, Andrea Luccía Delgado, Luis Alberto Contreras Montilla, John Márquez, Aley Judith Toro Rivas, Tibisay Rubi Rivas Toro, and Victor Macedo Santana — rooted in collective work, discipline, and passion. From the start it brought together young people and adults between the ages of 8 and 70: artistic training there was always, just as much, human training.
The integral actor
TFAI understands art as an architecture of the self: the performer is not an executor of technique, but a total creator who inhabits the body, emotion, memory, and imagination as territories of truth. Its methodology integrates five languages — acting, dance, circus, film, and music — converging on a single principle: the integral actor as an expanded human being. Training runs through intensive Friday and Saturday sessions, 10 hours a week across 11 months a year, where every creative process investigates a contemporary issue and transforms it, step by step, into a staged work.
Mission, and a path toward New York
TFAI's mission is to train integral actors capable of building bridges between cultures, languages, and realities — a message of universal coexistence, with no distinction of race, religion, or nationality. Its vision is to become a reference international arts company based in New York City, part of the global conversation on contemporary performing arts. Between Broadway and independent creative spaces, New York isn't just a destination: it's a territory of dialogue, challenge, and permanence for something that began as a workshop lab in Mérida.
In dialogue with theatre's great voices
TFAI's work rests on one conviction: art is not representation, it is presence. That idea speaks with Shakespeare's human being as the stage of the world, with Stanislavski's emotional truth, Stella Adler's imagination as a creative choice, Lee Strasberg's inner life as dramatic material, and Sanford Meisner's truth of the instant. TFAI doesn't imitate these voices — it continues their search, held up by discipline, commitment, sensitivity, collective work, research, artistic excellence, and humanity.
TFAI was never a building. It was and is a heartbeat. It never had walls, only a universe of bodies that learned to listen to each other. Because art, when it's true, doesn't belong to a place: it belongs to humanity.
That's the path in this forest where the stage crosses everything else I do: a school of presence, discipline, and expression that also feeds the way I think about technology and culture — the same idea I explore through vibecoding and the philosophical blog. This connection with TFAI keeps growing inside this forest. In the meantime, you can follow the rest of what I cultivate on TikTok — @simonforall.