“An intimate journey after the end” and the theater as a focus of absences

A few months ago, Mabel wrote to me. We had met at a workshop last summer. He tells me that he is part of a group that was formed at the Timbre 4 school, and that part of the initial group wanted to reformulate the material from the editing they had made. And that they had an appointment for the premiere in the Boedo room: it was in a month and a half. They wanted to offer me to direct them.

Those Sundays that we used to do The dovecoteof Victoria Refrigerator in this same theater in Boedo. One Sunday, I sat in the empty room for a while before giving up space, and looked at the space as if for the first time. The images came to me. I lived in La Plata, and in this space I slept many nights among the cats that came and went after rehearsals at dawn. We paint walls, we hang pots, we strip cables, we drink wine, we love each other, we peel, we laugh, we dream. It was the year 2001, and this still unnamed space had an incredible dynamic. Claudio Tolcachir, his director, opened the door of his house and of the bedroom, and everything was a powder keg. Ideas, laughter, tests, hours and hours of sharing. I learned that theater is work. We were doing devil’s ham, lysestrataand another job we only did in Mar del Plata called the tangle. We repeated it for a month in the early morning of another eventful month of December. The theater was a protection. A house.

I told Mabel to get together with the band to get to know each other, and to give me all the material they had: texts, drafts, audiovisuals, photos, sketches, everything. We meet in a rather noisy pizzeria in the city center and we talk. The conversation was short. Deep, frank and concrete. I asked them for a week to present them with a proposal. I immediately thought of The vocationof Cesar Brie, an indispensable book. Light board. I went home and it wasn’t on the bedside table, but I found it right away. I read it again. That’s it.

Not so long ago, the following happened. After one of your lessons, Cesar Brie He asked me if we could talk the next day after practice. We sit in a taxi-bar. Caesar I ate a sandwich before going to rehearse The balancer. I was nervous and not hungry.

—I wanted to suggest if you wanted to replace me in a piece called Willingness. It’s about the life of Simone Weill.

Silence. He chews with blue eyes.

“I saw her,” I replied.

In work, Caesar he was flying in a harness.

“I’m too big for the harness,” I told him, and he smiled.

—And I wanted to propose if you want to do the old prince with me.

I loved it!

And also if you want to join Karamazov.

– And if you want to do a play that will be played in a train station.

He stopped chewing, smiled and looked at the time. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. I left confused, happy and proud. Caesar I had always been trained, by reading his theoretical texts and watching his works, his documentaries. I said yes to everything. One week before opening The will, fragments for Simone Weil in the new city ​​theater, the pandemic appeared. Containment has come, and Caesar It was on the other side of the Atlantic. Since then, we have not seen each other. We repeated the work of “the station” several times by zoom, with a whole group scattered around the world. Sometimes we write to each other. The last time I asked him if I could use texts from The vocation for setting Timbre 4, and his response was absolutely generous. He built a new wooden theater in the mountains of northern Italy during a pandemic.

The following week we met the group at a house to read. There was no light. We lit candles and before finishing the reading, the light came back on. There was commotion in the air. We worked hard and made An intimate journey after the end. The space, also new, is not made of wood. It’s theater and it’s a house, it’s in the heart of Villa Crespo, and it bears the name of a grandmother, Ñaca.

For this column, I asked the group to write a few words about how they feel about the process today, after going through so many stages. And in this constellation of sentences appear: “To know Caesar, reading their texts, helped me to understand that staging awakens the sensitivity of the actors, transforming poetry into action”. “It’s a process that we give ourselves. A possibility of nourishing a material and of nourishing oneself”. “A work is a test. What is thought becomes entangled with what arises, with this diffuseness that must be grasped. We then thought of taking tangentially what this too real situation offered us. Because each creative instance wants to liberate itself from its birth.” “A big leap into the abyss, a big leap into the faith that continues to build.” “Disarm, put the scenes back in place. Other places, other movements. The infinite possibilities of telling a text. “The process was mutating from an idea of ​​collapse to the idea of ​​transformation from the texts of Caesar. His own transformation from that aimless young man to the artist he is today. Images of joy, sadness, fear, challenges, in a dream plane. “A journey of years in search of an ellipse that stops the intensity of time.”

*An intimate journey after the enddramaturgy and direction Manuel Vignau. Starting Sunday, March 19, every Sunday at 8:00 p.m. at Teatro ÑaCa (Julián Álvarez 924, Villa Crespo, CABA) Admission: $2,000 per alternative.

Continue reading