2023-07-09 05:59:49
“We are grateful for the moment in which it arrives participation in the Avignon festival: it is a colophon, because it comes at the end of a project about Bach’s music that has occupied us for many years and, above all, because the part of recognition it can have reverts to the whole team and that’s fantastic”, he says Maria Muñoz, one of the two souls of Mal Pelo, together with Pep Ramis. The company of Celrà ends today his stay at the Grec in Barcelona, where he made his debut Double infinite, in which Muñoz and Ramis reunite as a duo, while finalizing the details for their participation, from July 20 to 25 at the most important performing arts event in the worldwhich celebrates its 77th edition this year.
For the first time, a company from Girona is included in the program of the Avinyó festival, which turns the French city into the epicenter of global contemporary creation for three weeks in July. “It is a very relevant meeting point for the profession, a reflection of a very plural and varied scene and a context that allows you to share an often very intimate work in front of people with whom you can talk about very deep things, because there are performers, directors, programmers and thinkers about the stage act”, says the choreographer and dancer.
It encourages exchange and is a great showcase to open up to new exhibition circuits, but the coolest part of this adventure, insists Muñoz, is the piece with which they are part of the poster, Inventions, and work in progress created during the toughest confinement with the active participation of the twenty members who make up Mal Pelo.
«The best thing about being in Avignon is doing it with a piece that involves the whole company», summarizes a work that has eight dancers, a string quartet and four voices on stage, apart from the three technicians and the road manager.
And it is that, at a time, the pandemic, in which many creators were forced to work alone, in dance solos and small-format proposals, Mal Pelo opted for “a celebration of teamwork”.
“All our lives we have had the desire to do something big, but it had always been impossible. Nobody had work because we were all at home and that brought us together a lot, even if we had to do the meetings online, confined», she says, convinced that yes Inventions it went ahead “because of the stubbornness” of the director of the Grec, Cesc Casadessús.
Mal Pelo, at the best performing arts festival in the world
The Barcelona festival – co-producer of the show together with Temporada Alta – had to host its premiere and “he insisted to us so much that we had to dream that it could be premiered, which gave us strength to continue working, with regular meetings between dancers and musicians making a very careful selection of what would make up Inventions», continues Maria Muñoz about the piece, premiered at Les Drassanes de Barcelona in the summer of 2020, aftera fifteen-day quarantine of the entire team at l’Animal a l’Esquena, at Mas Espolla de Celrà, Mal Pelo’s base of operations.
Adaptation to space
With musical direction by Joel Bardolet and Quiteria Muñoz as coordinator of the lyrical voices, Inventions is the third title of the tetralogy that Mal Pelo has dedicated to Baroque music, Bach Project.
The turbulence of the pandemic, however, had a direct impact on the spirit of d‘this dance piece designed for unique spaces and which is modulated depending on the place that will host it.
“The situation made us realize that, rather than opting for complexity, we had to be able, through the selection of the repertoire, to draw a dramaturgical line that made it possible to integrate the choreographic approaches in a short time, with a lot of freshness, almost as if it were a concert with the ability to adapt depending on the space where it should be performed“, continues.
Thus, the piece that premiered at the Grec is not exactly the same as it was later seen in the monastery of Sant Pere de Galligants in Girona nor the one seen in one of the ships of La Villette, in Paris, where they attracted the attention of the director of the Avignon festival, Tiago Rodrigues (breath).
In Avignon you will see a stage version ofInventions, adapted to the courtyard of the Saint-Joseph high school, one of the most important spaces of the contestwhich throughout the festival’s history has hosted shows by Joseph Nash or Sasha Waltz, and during the fall, will continue to tour the Netherlands, Greece, Georgia and Francea country with which Mal Pelo has established a special relationship in recent years.
“We have always worked a lot abroad, but for years France was a passing place, we rarely performed there, beyond a couple of faithful theaters. In 2013, the Théâtre de la Ville de Paris became interested in Bach – the first piece of the composer’s tetralogy – and we haven’t stopped going to France, we’ve ended up building a very solid exhibition circuit”, explains Maria Muñoz
Inventions and the third co-production of Temporada Alta that will be seen at the Avinyó festival, a competition which, according to the director of the Girona competition, Salvador Sunyer, “is, by far, the most relevant performing arts event in the world”. In this same edition, there is also scheduled Shared lanscapesan ambitious European project with the participation of the Girona festival that includes seven shows in one day in natural spaces. Coordinated by Caroline Barneaud (Théâtre Vidy-Lausane) and Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll), it has, among others, a proposal from El Conde de Torrefiel. A Temporada Alta will not be seen until the fall of 2024.
Another festival co-production, Sonoma de La Veronal, already achieved an outstanding milestone in Avignon in 2021 by becoming the first Catalan company to perform at the Palau dels Papes, the main stage of the French festival.
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