Premiered on La Seine in Paris shortly before the arrival of a pandemic that stopped the whole world, the Pastoral for the Planet from La Fura dels Baus arrives this Sunday at Espai Port in Sant Feliu de Guíxols as part of a Porta Ferrada festival that will be dressed up to commemorate some 60 years of life, in which he has always dared to bring different and groundbreaking proposals. With the Gio Symphonia performing the soundtrack and under the direction of Carlus Padrissaone of the founders of the most irreverent and groundbreaking Catalan theater company, the show is based on to Symphony nº 6 by Beethoven offering an immersive meditation on the relationship between nature and humans.
“Basically, we ask if the human species will become extinct. The earth will not end, as some say. In any case, it is humans who, at one point or another, will become extinct or transform. Humanity emerges from the sea. We all come from water. The human being, like the rest of the animals on the planet, come from a fish» explains Padrissa about a show in which the audience will decide, through a mobile application, which is the ending. “We will go back to being fish or we will directly become extinct and only a few will be saved chosen ones who will be our successors?’ advances the director about the two options on which the viewers will have to choose with their votes.
The show will feature the musical interpretation of the Gio Symphonia, the symphony orchestra born in 2012 by Marcel and Jaume Sabatéwhich Padrissa considers “one of the most interesting and fascinating orchestras in Catalonia”.
The power of popular music
Apart from the Central Symphony, which Beethoven finished composing in 1808 and which is one of his few programmatic pieces of music, which the composer subtitled as “Records of country life”, Pastoral for the Planet also includes other compositions of Reicha, Weber, Rietz and Felix Mendelssohn, as well as pieces of popular music from various parts of the planet. “Beethoven was very inspired by popular music, such as the songs of the shepherds and all the heritage of the oral tradition that grandparents transmit to their grandchildren and that, in this way, are passed down from generation to generation. For this reason we have taken topics like a jota from the Lower Ebro or a Ukrainian folk song and the folk songs of the Transnistrian regionnext to Moldavia, where they make some voices with a certain tension” points out the director of this co-production of La Fura dels Baus, Erda Éducation Reserche Dévelopement Artistique and Le Grand Théâtre de Provence which uses the oral tradition to address, in the key of metaphor, the relationship between humanity and the planet.
As a metaphor for this possible extinction of humanity, Padrissa says that the Sant Feliu de Guíxols show will include a piece in which a mother splashes water on her baby, which is the planet, while singing an original song from Guinea . “There is a singer in the show, but the rest of the participants are very ‘fureros’. They roll on the floor and move as they interact with the spectators,” he adds.
A utopian society
Pastoral for the Planetwhich has illustrations and scenography by Mihael Milunovic and creativity d’Eyesbergveers towards the utopian ideal of a global village that shares communities and lives off nature’s resources: the deep ecology model defended by futuristic industrial designer Jacque Fresco. A pioneer in human factors engineering, Fresco spanned from biomedical innovations to fully integrated social systems and, through The Venus Project, championed sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural resource management and profit that this would bring to society.
30 years since the inauguration of the Barcelona Games
The representation of the Pastoral for the Planet at the Porta Ferrada Festival in Sant Feliu de Guíxols will coincide with a very special ephemeris for La Fura dels Baus. On July 24, 1992, the company was in Montjuïc performing the dress rehearsal for the opening show of the Barcelona Olympic Games, which premiered the very next day at the Olympic Stadium.
Padrissa, ideologue of that one maritime spectacle that dazzled millions of people around the worlddirected, alongside Àlex Ollé and with the collaboration of Hansel Cereza, Jordi Arús, Miki Espuma and Pera Tantiñá a proposal that included symphonic music composed and conducted by the Japanese Ryūichi Sakamoto. “That show is closely linked to this one Pastoral for the Planet because it was seen by practically half of the world’s population at that time» explains Padrissa.
An experience that the creator remembers as unique and that links to this globalized planet that the new show is talking aboutsince they introduced the figure of a bloodied man being lifted up by some sailors and who wanted to be hugged in Sarajevo. “It was necessary to remember that just two thousand kilometers from the city of Barcelona, in the Balkans, there was a war where many people died”