Alessandra García turns the beaches of the Costa del Sol into her stage

She was told that her vision which she had been working on for months was "impossible". She had devised a groundbreaking performance on the beach, with the audience on benches in the sand and the actors in the sea. With the proposal and even the funding, she still had to face bureaucracy and the need for permits that were never going to arrive. She cried "a lot", she admitted. But after three days she sat down in front of a notebook and reimagined her project. The result is La Obra del Mar, a new concept that she has called "scenic exhibition", where the action takes place over the course of a month in varied formats. "Ruins forge the way," said García, in hindsight. Alessandra is a performer, director, playwright and cultural manager with a Max award for best new show.

Regulations may try to stop her from bringing theatre to the coast, but she always has her alternative, street origins to turn to. "I'm going to appropriate the recreational norms of the beach, and from them I'm going to mimic the environment and do whatever I want, which I don't have to be given permission to do," she explained. Produced by Dos Bengalas (herself and Violeta Niebla) and the Fundación Teatral Antonio Banderas, Alessandra García takes all the rituals surrounding the beach and transforms them into a theatrical masterpiece outside all convention. García will make art from the ordinary: taking all the gear to spend the whole day in the sun, going for a stroll along the sand, applying sun cream and not wanting to get out of the water until sunset.

The first installment is Peinar la Orilla - Combing the Shore - a ten-day performance in which she will move along the coast on foot from Manilva to Nerja. From 1 to 10 August, she will walk from before dawn until midday, when she will rest at the home of local families. She will talk to them about their relationship with the sea. A GoPro camera on her forehead along with audio will document this journey through the different parts of Malaga province.

Her pilgrimage will end at the Balcón de Europa in Nerja. From there she will head to Motril where she will take a ferry to Al Hoceima (Morocco) to begin the next phase of performances: Hola es Azul. She crosses the sea, which symbolises her personal restlessness, with the eternal dilemma of whether she should leave Malaga and see what lies beyond the horizon. In Morocco, on a beach facing the coast of Nerja, she will do a "performance of faith". On 11 August at 8pm, she will wave for 4.44 minutes - representing communication and deep belief in numerology - hoping that someone will be waving from the other side.

Upon her return to Spain, she will take to the extreme the attitude of ignoring a mother's cry: "Get out of the water now!". On 17 August, from sunrise to sunset, Alessandra García will not get out of the water. "That doesn't mean that I can't ride on vehicles, such as mats, pedal boats or jet skis," she explained. Playa Virginia will be her starting point.

The last performance brings her back to the sand. In Playamar, Alessandra García will invite families to an intergenerational performance that claims the beach as one of the few places where families live together "without capitalism getting in the way". In Enterrar a MA-PA (Burying MA-PA) on 23 August at 7pm, they will play a classic summer game: burying people in the sand. Demonstrating the hierarchy of the family tree, in this performance sons bury their mothers, mothers bury their grandmothers and so on. All of these performances are free of charge.

Now come the experiences. Throughout August, theatrical audio device La Arena Quema (The Sand Burns) will be available for download on Bandcamp. It is recommended to start it up on Playa de la Misericordia, between 12 and 8pm. Through headphones and a mobile phone, the user will be carried away by the soundscape and words of Violeta Niebla and Alessandra García. "And the whole beach will be performing for you," she said.

Orquesografía will also be experienced through headphones: an audio guide will act as if it were a choreographic score from the Renaissance. 40 people per session will take part in an exclusive beach ritual. From 19 to 22 August, at 9am (in a place to be determined) they will create an ephemeral architecture of towels on the sand and will display all the popular wisdom on how to spend a day at the beach "that has been passed down from generation to generation". In addition, they will witness how an 'outsider' carries out choreography when they are unable to stick an umbrella in the sand. "It's an excuse to open the field of scenic vision to occupy public spaces to mimic reality," she explained.

The conclusion of all this "madness" will come at the end of the month: from 27 to 31 August, with a staging that is close to what she had in mind for the project in its inital stages. It will take place on the beach, with the audience seated on chairs and towels integrated into the usual landscape. This final section is entitled Verismo, Primer Movimiento in reference to that artistic movement of the late 19th century that represented in a realistic and crude way the daily life of ordinary people and that changed the plots of the operas of the time. A combination of the working-class world and grandiloquence that identifies it. "I ask the sea to give me permission to do this for the rest of my life, to help me kill what hurts and embrace what comes to me," she said. She promises to repeat this amalgamation of performances every August, first in Malaga and then along any coast in the world.