Europe by Sharon Fridman and Luis Luque delights our senses and intellect

2023-06-02 14:47:36

When one rereads the synopsis of a show during its corresponding resting process, it is easier to put words and links to what one has perceived. Almost as if the act of “digesting” it meant putting one foot on a place that allows all its viewers to exchange impressions, and another foot where one enriches their personal imagination.

That is why I would affirm that striving to exhaustively analyze Europa (with or without our available tools, with or without our personal baggage), is to miss the opportunity to listen to what it offers us. Or put another way: Something like someone is telling us his point of view on a subject that involves all of us as human beings, and one passes “filtering” each of its broadcasts so that everything is translated into our own language/way of understanding the world. So, if we take this to an extreme, do we go to the theater, the cinema, read a book, etc…, to reaffirm our ideas and personal perceptions, or is there really something else we are doing?

I assure you that this work of Sharon Fridman and Luis Luque It basically satisfied everything I’m looking for in a scenic piece put together by top-level professionals. Therefore, I left the theater as if I had been given a gift to my measure. Nevertheless, Europa it is something that has been arranged to be represented before an audience (whether one is part of it or not), initiating a communicative act. With the above, I do not want to imply that one does not have the power to choose what he collects from each of the things he has perceived; but even so, I invite all of us to reevaluate our role as spectators, what we are doing during our interactions with what surrounds us.

Along these lines, one could raise Europa to the “pantheon” of the works that have “marked your life”, or on the contrary, trace “fissures” in order to neutralize the enthusiasm of one of your viewers. So, how to manage the variable that the viewer is intervening in his perception process, or better leave it in brackets, and we dedicate ourselves to enjoying the mere fact that we are enjoying a stage work of extraordinary quality? In any case, I argue that Europa is a good example of those works, in which in the middle of a debate, it seems that they are talking about different works

Whatever the solution to these problems, one as a person who writes about performing arts, has to assume the responsibility that their intervention is one more among others (regardless of whether one feels with sufficient authority to ask for a turn to speak , because you think you have something valuable to share). Please note that The performing arts are part of our cultural heritage, to this extent it must be understood as a public service available to the “more knowledgeable” and those who go to a theater for the first time.. For this reason, freedom of interpretation must be a right that must not be questioned.

As regards his staging of Europa I would highlight that its lighting and costume changes were essential to structure a piece that lacks a narrative structure. If that Europa unfolds a succession of images whose development implies a fluctuation of recurring ideas, which are sometimes raised from different points of view, and others, simply, serve to give rise to a greater depth. So much so, that if one remembers what he saw he ends up, intuitively, linking his turning points. Really, Few have been the works that I have seen that have been better prepared to be remembered by their spectators. Which seems extremely beautiful to me, and on top of that it revalues ​​the ephemeral nature of the performing arts.

From one “turning point” to another, there has been such meticulous and exquisite work that it was like taking a panoramic view of the history of a tree for centuries. Tree, which by the way, has witnessed what has constituted what we have associated around the word “europe”, regardless of its meaning that is used in various contexts. That is: some of them are suggested; others refer us to terrible events that have occurred in the continent that has been baptized as such; others lead us to think that this word could be used in many more situations; etc It is most stimulating to consider that the fact that there are so many words is just one of the things that facilitates the exercise of communication with our peers and our own thinking, not that they themselves exist. Thus, regardless of whether we call something a certain way, it will continue to be what it has been up to now.