2023-11-08 17:35:40
The work – High season
Text and direction: Mariano Pensotti. Performers: Rami Fadel Khalaf, Alejandra Flechner, Diego Velázquez, Susana Pampin, Horacio Acosta and Pablo Seijo. The Salt Channel, November 5.
On a weekend when the horses were spinning non-stop in the Devesa, moving cyclically for the enjoyment of the little ones, the director and playwright Mariano Pensotti returned to the Temporada Alta festival with a scenographic carousela theatrical flourish to reflect on the power of fiction and the blurred border between simulation and reality. If in his last visit to the contest, last year, the Argentine creator planted in El Canal de Salt two identical scenographies to create a game of parallels between the present and the future, this time he installed there a huge rotating artifact, a circular structure that did not stop rotating in the ninety minutes of the showexposing some elements while covering others, this time playing with the importance of what is shown and what is hidden.
Mariano Pensotti brings to Temporada Alta ‘Los años’, a dual and simultaneous story about the passage of time
The formal filigree, the work of scenographer Mariana Tirantte, is the scaffolding that supports it another filigree, very complex, but superbly executed: a play within a play within a play. Pensotti’s theatrical matrioxca -titled The workof course- it starts with a Lebanese theater director who travels to Argentina to unravel the mystery of the mysterious theatrical project of a certain Simon Frank, a Polish Jew who took refuge in a village about 200 kilometers from Buenos Aires, and who for decades has represented the story of his life in a great show involving all their neighbors. As if it were Esparraguera’s Passion, the inhabitants of the area participate in the play, as performers, extras or technicians, reconstructing a New Warsaw in the middle of the Argentine pampas to evoke the tragedy of the Holocaust until, in a twist unexpected, they realize that this large collective enterprise was actually a fraud.
The work pull the thread of it all to reveal the layers of violence that hide today’s societies. The tensions arising from the coexistence between the Nazis who sought refuge in the country with the largest Jewish community in Latin America they overlap the disappearances of the Argentine dictatorship, mirroring the situation in the Middle East, with the familiar backpack of the Lebanese director.
Pensotti weaves together the testimonies and life stories narrated by the actors with photographs and audiovisuals projected on the circular structurewhich works like a concave screen, to present a fiction in the form of documentary theater which pivots on two ideas: that life, in the end, is a performance and that the theater has a transformative power over people, because everyone who gets involved in Frank’s show does it to the maximum, of the electrician who takes on the role of a Nazi officer and discovers the darkness within him in the left-wing activist who hides from the military by posing as an actress.
Memory, oblivion, reality and fiction turn and turn on the stage, as the fair horses of the attractions did, simulating a ride which, in reality, was only a mirage.
#carousel #memory