One breathes in the garden as in the forest and one wants to be in the theatre as in the world. Someone prepares the gardens to enjoy an arranged part of nature, originally wild and full of dangers.
In the theatre, someone arranges the words and the images in a narrative that draws a logic that looks like an answer.
But just like when I leave the garden and enter the forest when I leave the theatre and return to the world, all the illusion vanishes and the world that appears again before my eyes becomes untamed, dangerous and always incomprehensible.
Breathing in the garden is like being in a forest, is a play that is essentially an individual stage exercise.
Whoever attends the play occupies the role of performer and audience consecutively.
This play proposes to the audience to embody the two fundamental roles of the theatrical act:
someone watches silently while someone performs a movement on stage. And from this primitive theatrical convention, which has endured for thousands of years to the present day, a simple game is proposed through a narrative sustained by simple movements that confront the participant with the convention represented.
This experience raises some questions about reality as an artifact of the imagination, its materialization and construction and why we like to observe in silence, as we do when we go to the theatre, the artifice of the world we have created.
Conceived·Devised by El Conde de Torrefiel
Direction·Dramaturgy·Text: Tanya Beyeler, Pablo Gisbert
Voice: Kang Malgeum
Korean Translation: Suh Gahui
Sound design: Rebecca Praga
Technical director: Isaac Torres
Sound technician: Uriel Ireland
Production: Uli Vandenberghe
Executive production: CIELO DRIVE SL
Distribution and Tour management: Alessandra Simeoni
Co-production: Santarcangelo Festival (IT) / CSS Teatro stabile di innovazione del Friuli Venezia Giulia
Supported by Mas Nyam Nyam, Mieres (ES)
The Spanish duo theater company formed by Tanya Beyeler and Pablo Gisbert in 2010 transforms today’s political reality into acute abstraction through deceivingly simplistic, banal signs of everyday. Gilbert’s indifferent, poetic texts and Beyeler’s slightly offbeat mise-en-scene fabricate intricate montage to translate the newly emerging tensions and contradictory frictions between individuals and collectivism into a unique incongruous stage language. They invite us to look straight into the heart of alienation prompted by new forms of totalitarianism. The sight is bizarrely tragic, or tragically hilarious, and all the while strikingly serene. It comes as the caricature of today’s Europe deprived of working political vision, as well as an aching self-portrait of this era. The afterimage of the discursive vacancy reverberates as a piercingly challenging question on how individuals can come up with new definitions of, as well as practical activation of, freedom and responsibilities within today’s predicament.