2023-05-26 23:21:31
Rodrigo García is back, although he has never really left. Three years ago he launched PS/WAM at Las Naves de Matadero in Madrid, a performative installation based on Mozart’s piano sonatas. And even so, that feeling of return could be felt in the air in the days before and at the premiere that took place on May 25 at the Teatro de la Abadía in Madrid. A feeling that has a lot to do with the new work presented, Christ is on Tindera plea against the ridiculousness of contemporary man and which represents a true step forward in the theater of this creator, father of the national and international scenic avant-garde.
And what would you do if fascism came to power?
Further
The work is the result of a work of almost two years. García, after directing the National Theater of Montpellier until 2018, which he baptized with the name of human too human, returned to the Asturian village where he has his home: “Above all, I came back to read. That project was wonderful, we had a beautiful theatre, but the work was also hard: watching theatre, speaking, projecting… I didn’t have time to read, I stopped doing it, when that’s what I do, the material I work with”, assures García in conversation with elDiario.es. A Rodrigo García who, after a pandemic and voluntary confinement, has been working for weeks in Madrid, the city where he was born artistically, with which he fought and which he loved in his first works, those that today are close to myth when someone who could see them narrates them: The three Little Pigs (1993), the spanish butcher (1997), Protect me from what I want (1998), Meet people, eat shit (1999), Stay at home you jerks (1999), After sun (2001), I bought a shovel at IKEA to dig my grave (2003)… “I freak out with Madrid, it’s unrecognizable, it’s full of tourists,” says García, about to turn 60, but who continues with a tense eye, clinging to the present, observing it, playing with it, disbelieving and always caustic.
The author of hilarious texts returned due to his capacity for unusual laceration, the director who brought the power of Bruce Nauman’s universe to the stage, the director capable of creating a centripetal force that convulsed the audience and it seemed that that bourgeois and retrograde art in the that theater often becomes could finally be a possible tool to change the world. A theater full of freedom, poetry, brotherhood and at the same time ruthless, denouncer, heir to the harsh verb of Thomas Bernhard, the one that unremittingly accuses the State and its repressive apparatuses —such as work or schools— of ending with the individual. García faced and fought to the point of exhaustion with the traditional theater that labeled him as a “publicist”, who wanted to label him as enfant terrible to dwarf him, a profession in which even some of his forefathers, such as a former director of the National Drama Center, said of him: “What a shame someone doesn’t chain him to a table so he can write.” They accepted him as an author. They did not want their uncomfortable theater where the sacrosanct theatrical concepts of character, conflict and development disappeared and a space full of freedom for the performance, art, dance, body, video and installation.
New cast for an idiot theater
Without making a treatise on this almost two-hour work, two or three important aspects can be pointed out to understand the dimension of the change and the commitment of this man who, at 60 years old, faces looking at the current world, judging it mercilessly and stand morally and politically before him.
The first note has to do with the cast. García has decided to give up his work, his “usual actors”, he explained at a press conference. “I’ve always been uncomfortable with this social media society and how relationships have changed, something I accept but don’t want to be a part of. Of course, I observe it, I am amused, I look at it almost tenderly, almost with the look of an old man, of someone who has not the slightest interest in participating. And to deal with this I wanted to arrive fragile at the moment of creation. You have to arrive fragile at the essay, what is the use of arriving with certainties. And for this I decided to work with new, young people, I also wanted to know how they thought”, continued explaining this director who ended up, after an extensive casting, working with three brute forces: Elisa Forcano, Selam Ortega and Carlos Pulpón. Three actors who are also accompanied on stage by the musician Javier Pedreira, who turns his guitar into a fundamental experimental and sonic storm of torment in the work.
The important thing about this change is the gesture. A gesture that he already carried out in 2001 at the extinct Sitges Festival, in which he staged Sometimes I feel so tired that I do these things, a work that was the first important opening for a more Madrid-based García and that ended up being vital for the following years: there he began a relationship with actors who would later be vital, such as Nico Baixas, Rubén Ametller and, of course, Juan Navarro. The movement this time is similar and it seems that it has gone well for him as well.
Second note. Christ is on Tinder it is an excrement returned, thrown, to whoever generated it. Many of its parts are ridiculous and stupid that border on what is tolerable. Images of a fotonovela created for the show with the same actors are projected on the screen. Note that many of the names of the characters are from television figures and the star system from Argentina 40 years ago (Moria Casán, Mimi Pons, Gianni Lunadei or Susu Pecoraro, for example). Memory enters, the child who was born in a neighborhood in the province of Buenos Aires. But until there. The rest is stupidity, a concave mirror of who we are, of what we suck on networks and screens.
García performs in this production an idiotic theater most of the time. He returns to the respectable what he generates. On stage he introduces a state-of-the-art mechanical dog, which moves like a real one, an element Blade Runner who looks at us and questions us. Thus, Tino, who is called the dog, will watch the fotonovelas as if he were watching an episode of National Geographic. Tino will look at an audience that, unsuspecting, will laugh with his quasi-animal antics without suspecting that he is the one being observed. But what is most surprising about this idiotic theater by García is the absence of vents.
Garcia’s new war
In the work of this creator there were always contrasts, the stupid in front of death, the idiotic in front of the possibility of love, the derisory of the human being in front of his capacity for transcendence. García’s theater was a theater where it was claimed with force and hope that things could be otherwise. The public was attacked, but they were also summoned, they were invited. His theater was centripetal and back and forth between the stage and the stands. In this montage, only in three moments are outlined some small grooves, treated in an austere manner.
The first one is a chat between the actors with their backs to the audience while on a big screen we see those same actors fall repeatedly, on a beautiful starry night, into a grave dug into the ground. That talk in the face of death, that brotherhood in the awareness that life is something precious and that we are wasting it, for poetic capacity and brotherhood, is one of those moments. The others will occur in the only two small texts said on stage. All others will be said in playback. Carlos Pulpón, high on drugs, with his nose stuffed with cotton because until a few minutes ago he was bleeding his brains for her, says: “I have strengthened myself to be able to slow down, to do less. I have strengthened myself to be delicate. ethereal A pen. I am strong as a feather.” Selam Ortega, almost at the end of the work, will say: “No, I will not end up decrepit like the old ones. I’ll put an end to it sooner.” They will be the only three moments where the barrier between the scene and the public will be crossed. In all other cases Garcia will keep a cool distance. When asked by this newspaper at a press conference about this distance, García was severe: “Everything is out of contempt, out of contempt for society, I start from contempt, I start by saying I don’t want to see you, the public is almost like a guest to see a film, and yes, I make an idiotic theater, a theater based on what I observe, I don’t believe anything”.
That is the new war of this creator. His position before the world. The core change. And from there a scene will emerge where for the first time García has dared to choreograph, the dance will appear. A quiet and introspective dance. One use of installation and symbolic space, some phantasmagorical scenes that will be a transition between stupidity and stupidity, among which stands out a duel of two naked beings with wigs, one male and the other female, who attack and love each other with axes, violence and strong symbolism which refers to one of the most powerful installations of this creator: I’d rather Goya lose sleep than any son of a bitch. As in all the work, in this action García does not avoid gender discourse. Something that may hurt or not like certain viewers, but which is also a breath of fresh air in a society where political correctness prevails. And there is also a dance of ghosts covered in mink that is difficult to semantic, but which very well summarizes the new paths and times of this creator’s new theater.
In Christ is on Tinder, García has begun to paint again, but on another canvas, with other pigments. There will be all the recognizable elements of her work, the objects, the actions, the brilliant text and the incorrect criticism, even a small action with house brand food (by the way, a beautiful action, where a human virgin, Elisa Forcano, immolates and lacerates on a floor of fried potatoes). But there will be no communion with the public.
Third and last note. In the end, an image will prevail, Selam Ortega will ride a dirt bike muddy to the marrow, she will stare straight ahead, delicately illuminated by Carlos Marquerie. That is the image that García says motivated this work. Navigator and muddy, dirty and determined to continue. In 1976, the great musician Luis Alberto Spinetta, during the Argentine dictatorship, wrote the song Captain Beto’s ring that said that: “There goes Captain Beto through space with his fiber ship made in Haedo, yesterday a bus driver, today a master among the masters of the air.” In that remake glorious of Space Oddity of David Bowie, Spinetta wondered: “Where is the place that everyone calls heaven? Why have I come here if I can’t stand solitude anymore? Where will there be a city in which someone whistles a tango? Beto/García, in this case, it seems that he no longer expects to find, but has decided to continue browsing. It is that ethical and vital decision that García exposes to the public.
The work will be in Madrid until June 11, to then go to the High season Girona, and then to Paris, Nancy and Prague… Rodrigo García’s theater calls for a pilgrimage, because it is not a theater for leisure and entertainment, but a pure rite of confrontation. For audiences who have never been to one of his plays, they might loathe it but are unlikely to just hang out.
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