At the premiere of the play Aphonia by Luis Sosa Berlanga, we find a piece that unites clown with contemporary dance, where we see his character Nino again, accompanied by his inseparable stuffed animal Molly, and which closes with a small talk about the political depth of the arts scenic
The piece seems to reproduce different moments of Nino’s relationship with himself, a contradictory and problematic relationship, in a dialectical process of encounter and separation, of adjustment and mismatch of personality with his past, his present and his future. The thematic proposal fits into this structure, where loneliness is presented between light and shadows —specifically “lights”, more than “lights”, because it is not about positive resolutions of loneliness, but moments of lucidity where the current situation becomes less heavy—, between meetings and disagreements of the person who is building himself in a socially alien space, but who needs the social to build himself. It is constructed dialectically, in a negative affirmation, which permanently reveals its contradictions.. This is at the bottom of the figure of the clown, which is pure action, so its combination with contemporary dance results in a direct point to the problematic and contradictory core of Modernity, between the objective and the subjective, between what is necessary and the contingent, between a continuous present and an eternal return.
Photo: CIRAE. Florentino joins him
The 15-minute piece works as a journey with ups and downs through five acts or moments that mark its theme through a fragment of paintings in an exhibition de Mussorgsky / Ravel, where each song is a moment of this process of derealization and rediscovery of Nino himself before Molly’s absorbed gaze. The opening is a walk, an appreciation of the surroundings, in which Nino, after arranging the scene to his liking, proudly walks through it in a free opening. The second act begins with a moment of radical splitting, a look into a void that the audience does not see, but which Nino immediately places himself on, and which breaks the movement into a painful, almost spasmodic succession, which speaks of the moments of darkness that can arise inevitably and unexpectedly in everyday normality. But Nino rebels, and in a third moment he shows the self-determination of the subject that manifests itself in precise, tense, violent, refined gestures. A self-determination that founds a reunion: Molly joins the piece from her initial passive position of observer to share the security recovered (or gained from solitude, depending on how you see it) from Nino. The moment of sharing, of meeting, of joy for being with the other arises. But unfortunately, Molly is not a person with whom human communication is possible, so the darkness does not completely disappear. There is a meeting, but a meeting extorted by the need for a meeting. For this reason, Nino disappears recovered, but the cost is incalculable, leaving dejected.
The combination of contemporary dance and clown, with that sometimes gloomy, sometimes brilliant background of Mussorgsky’s music, makes us find ourselves before something very similar to one of those sinister Disney shorts, the Silly Symphonies, where slapstick it was coupled with an epic soundtrack, and actions that were simultaneously ominous and comic were narrated through animation. Nino goes on a hellish inner journey, but in a daily inner hell, through a series of stadiums that anyone has been able to go through, especially in the context of confinement during the pandemic, during which society was more united than ever, but at the same time atomized and separated, her voice subtracted from the common of the street, the market, the workplace, confined to her pathetic self in the solitude of her home. Nino’s dance is a dialogue with himself in the absence of another, but desperate to go outside, towards the other, but not in a grandiose sense, as if humanity were a great word engraved in stone; on the contrary, communication seeks to be vulgar, emotional, but charged with that normality that allows humans to be human.
Photo: CIRAE. Florentino joins him
All this problem is developed by the author, actor and dancer of the piece, Luis Sosa Berlanga, in a post-act through a talk where he talks about Hannah Arendt and her workespecially of the human condition. Sosa Berlanga presents us with a series of Arendtian concepts —labor, work, action—, which refer to the different moments of the production and reproduction of human life. The first, labor and work, refer to immediate needs and the satisfaction of long-term needs; to eat and plan a life. However, only humanity gives itself fully free (fully human) in action: where the person enters the public space and creates a deviation from the inertia of labor and work, where the relationship process between subjects results in exits to inaction of survival. It is there where Sosa Berlanga introduces the clown, as a being that lives from birth to death in action, in communication with the other, who is the audience, and who is constantly installed in a problematic present and problematized by the gaze. of the clown, who looks for ways out, who seeks to give matter to the action. This space of communication is, for the author, what gives political depth to the performing arts, in particular to the possibilities of the clown in this dialogue.
In this context, Nino’s action is paradoxical, because he is a clown, he begs us with his eyes, he wants to involve us, but in his dramatic (although almost tragic) vortex, he is unable to make that connection: he has no voice. The hoarseness that gives the work its title is the problematic nucleus of Sosa Berlanga’s proposal, which brings us closer and further away at each moment of the action. At the moment it is, according to the author, un work in progressa piece that has to finish taking shape, but these wickers already show a different clown proposal, and who wants to open a relevant space for dialogue.
Photo: CIRAE. Florentino joins him