MÁLAGA HOY

Nietzsche and the peppered rabbit
Matarile proposes a dizzy staging experience with a pure dramatic argument; a success that the festival, tasteful producer of the invention, can put down to itself.

         
What can I tell you? I love the theatre. One of the main reasons for this is that it is one of the few artistic forms of expression, perhaps the only one, that makes you leave the house and go to the theatre. In your castle you can download as much music as you want, watch your favourite film in your home cinema, read a book translated into one of the new digital media (or belong to a Readers' Club, something that also relieves some people from going to the bookshop or the library) and even have an invaluable art gallery. But plays are performed in their place and you have to go there to see them. However, it happens that the most essentially dramatic shows, those that present a content and aesthetics that can only materialise through the dramatic language, are becoming rarer: very often, what it is seen can be taken to (or it has been previously born from) a story, a film, a picture or another cultural construct. Artificial Animals, Ana Vallés' new creation, allows the observer, however, to witness an absolute staging experience and herein lies part of its value: the one that gives drama its meaning, its singularity and its uniqueness.

Of course, the representation of man as a natural creature capable of the artificiality of its environment seems more favourable to drama than to any of the other beaux-arts. And Matarile has created a free world, that is, with its own rules, where man appears as he is, without intermediaries or tiring hermeneutics. With our memory set on Natural History, the group's previous play (that could be watched in Malaga a couple of years ago), it can be concluded that Aná Vallés investigation is not only going along the right path, but also may give us in the future some of the most regenerating surprises of the European staging scene. More than a lab, Matarile is a kitchen that laughs at itself and where, just the way an actress wants it, the peppered rabbit comes out very tasty. Artificial Animals winks at Beckett, and perhaps the Irish man would have come up with something similar on a good day. The absurd register, that is achieved by presenting men acting as they are, takes place here in a lively and sincere manner, which deserves all the best merits. The most outstanding moments of the staging, therefore, are those charged with the greatest doses of humour and these, at the same time, are related to the construction of the characters, roles used as condiment, and conditions as pickles. Happy Sisyphus. The stew gets closer -oh happiness!- to philosophy, a sign of the best drama: Nietzsche (extremely appropriate inclusion of his reflection about the vanity of the word), Descartes and Shopenhauer are drama. And parody. And I would like.
USA, Inglaterra, Yugoslavia, Italia y Alemania. Matarile ha apostado desde su creación por espectáculos que rompen totalmente las estructuras escénicas tradicionales y que se enmarcan dentro de un teatro contemporáneo que prescinde del hilo conductor del texto literario y donde la expresión corporal y la sugerencia alcanzan notable importancia.

Pablo Bujalance

LA OPINIÓN DE MÁLAGA

Harmonic portrait of human drama

Review. 25th Malaga’s Drama Festival
'ARTIFICIAL ANIMALS'
Company: Matarile Teatro
Original Idea and Director: Ana Vallés
Cast: Ana Vallés, Helen Bertels, Mauricio González, José Campanari, Ricardo Santana, Mónica García, Iván Marcos, Ramón Vázquez, Hugo Portas
Date and Venue: lst and 2nd of February, Alameda Theatre

The 25th Drama Festival of Malaga makes the right choice of searching amongst the best international shows available, and also has the honour of winning over prominent premieres at national level to include in its programme. This is how the Galician members of Matarile Teatro in a co-production with the Malaga festival have offered us the exclusive premiere of “Artificial Animals”.
This is a show that certainly leaves no-one indifferent. A narrative style out of the stereotypical rules, where the play has a clear start that poses a problem which is subsequently resolved. No, here the creator puts forward a harmonic portrait of characters that introduce themselves, becoming even more complicated in a metaphorical language. There are no symbols. It is just the introduction of more or less playful atmospheres, more or less oppressive, but always stunning and shocking ones, where the actor is part of this mirror where one can watch images that, along with the text, with the words, suggest a human being or, more precisely, lots of humanities.
Characters who never finish developing their conflict, because it is always interrupted, superimposed, by a new one, because what matters is not the presentation of the individual but of the collectiveness. A collection of micro-cosmos that make up the great macro-cosmos, where man seeks to dilute itself trying to blend in with the rest, even though this means losing his own identity.

Surprises. Transforming into something that one is not originally, but into what “corresponds” to him due to his education or due to social needs. A show full of surprises and above all, full of the work of the artists. The particular skills of each actor are fully developed by the director, who undertakes such freshness in the interpretation, so extremely natural, that it would make us think that improvisation is over discipline.
The choreography is beautiful, the group progressions and the stage movements, together with the deliberately untidy production, provide the oneiric atmosphere that is intended by the parable of the show. The actors, fully integrated as a group, demonstrate high quality in their responsibility.
And the information lays in the wholeness of the landscape, of the canvass, in a lively and original show. It is probably a performance that will please some more than others, but those that choose to do so, will have won the enjoyment of the dramatic language.

.Paco Inestrosa

Madrid Teatro

.Animales Artificiales, El mejor humor de Matarile.

Artificial Animals is a show full of freshness. Matarile returns with this play to their best humour and their ability to shock. After a more serious and disillusioned show, like Thunder and Mysteries, or the collaboration of Ana Valles with Teatro de la Abadia with Me acordaré de todos vosotros (I will remember you all), the company returns to the cheerful, sharp and ironic tone that has perhaps inspired their greatest achievements. However, reflection has not been relinquished and the thinking pulsating behind this latest delivery of the group is subtle, but elaborated and complex.

Texts from different sources - Knapp or Enric Gonzalez - are entangled with Ana Valles’s texts and with the contributions of the actors in a speech that is lucid, fun, provocative and coherent at the same time. The discussion between natural and artificial, the awareness of our own limitations and the ephemeral condition of people and things, the vulnerability of the body and the spirit, the burlesque leniency with the obsessions and infatuations that shape the different personalities, the invisibility of others by some people and the easiness, upsetting or soothing, in the transmutation, exchange, displacement or confusion of the elements that allegedly make up our personality are some of the motives that this show is built upon.
These motives are developed from Ana Valles’s singular and brilliant language, which responds to the expression, required by the topics that we mentioned earlier, to the point that it seems to establish a judgement of need in the relations between the speech content and the theatrical form. The piecemeal, the interruptions, the unexpected changes, the overlapping actions, the costumes and characterisations or the several transmutations are not ingenious solutions of staging effectiveness, or they are not so preferentially but, above all, the theatrical expression of a way to perceive the world. The breaks in the established series, the continuity of the lines of action or of speech, far from what is foreseeable or reasonable, or the persistent recurrences take us ironically sometimes to Bergson’s reflections about laughter which, according to the French thinker, is achieved by tracing the mechanic on the live matter. And, even though this concept of humour is favourable to the work of Matarile as a whole, it has never been more fitting than in this show, which elucidates precisely the relationships and the limits between artificialness and nature, which are the equivalent of Bergson’s terms relative to mechanical and live matter. The unexpected transition from one to the other, having the consequence of sharp fractures or obsessive actions turns out to be as comical as unsettling.
As in their previous work, Matarile's proposal frees the actors from the constraint of the characters and turns them into acting elements, into creators of moments and situations. They reveal themselves in a game that generates shattered attempts or stimulating parallelisms between scattered actions that coexist strangely but naturally, in appearance or in reality, on the stage. Another identity mark of the company contributes efficiently to this: the coexistence of musicians, singers, dancers and actors, whose work is not necessarily limited to the area of their alleged speciality. And it is admirable the degree of commitment with which they all have undertaken this task, leading to this feeling of an unfinished process that cannot be relinquished – a distant similarity to this attitude could be found in Bernhard – that the actors execute incessantly, either alone or with the occasional company of other members of the cast. In the oral language, familiar and colloquial things live together with those scientific, literary and philosophical, almost without a solution for continuity, which generates memorable soliloquies and dialogues, like some of the interventions by Ana Valles or the Melons monologue by Helen Bertels. And in the stage language, genders and styles overlap and cover each other constantly. The spaciousness of the stage in Fernan Gomez Theatre has allowed the use of solutions and special games, unthinkable in some of the places where some of the previous plays were presented. The placement of the objects and the movement of the actors on the stage are richer and the rupture of the fourth wall is more used, with the actors exiting and returning through the stalls area.

From these work procedures, Artificial Animals offers moments and images of great originality, power and beauty, sending hidden messages directed at some plastic arts, music or literary references and also at other of Matarile’s shows. If we were to remember just one of them, we would pick the dance by Monica Garcia with the only company of a never-ending monologue by Jose Campanari, who continues talking indifferent to everything after having left the stage and wandering around through the stalls area. But we must also remember the effectiveness of objects, such as the stall or the sofa, the masks sets, the wigs or the costumes. Without any doubt, the audience will have kept in their memory other images and fragments.

Eduardo Pérez-Rasilla

M25. MENOS 25

.ANIMALES ARTIFICIALES, sobre la empatía y el equilibrio.

Ana Vallés y la prestigiosa compañía Matarile Teatro, fundada en Santiago de Compostela hace ya más de dos décadas, nos proponen adentrarnos en su laboratorio teatral en busca de respuestas, o mejor dicho, interrogantes nuevos, acerca de una de las controversias más exploradas de la humanidad: la necesidad de un pacto social y las restricciones impuestas a los deseos que la aceptación de este exige.

Esta dicotomía irreductible no siempre se nos hace patente consciente y racionalmente pero es la causa de buena parte del malestar social que padecemos. Sufrimos por no lograr nuestros deseos y nos castigamos por tenerlos.

La obra, puesta en pie a través de un absurdo que recuerda a Beckett, conjuga los distintos lenguajes escénicos  -danza, teatro, música y silencio- en esta creación de laboratorio (entendamos por laboratorio nuestra sociedad) e investigación escénica que fue una de las triunfadoras de la pasada edición del festival de teatro de Málaga.

Animales Artificiales está perfectamente articulada y estructurada sin que esto la convierta en un corsé inamovible. Un equilibrio perfecto, y por ende, inestable, entre la norma y el deseo, que al fin y al cabo es la pelea que se está librando en escena.

SOITU.ES

.TEATRO. Animales artificiales. "Antinatural por naturaleza".

Creación y dirección: Ana Vallés. Con: Helen Bertels, José Campanari, Mónica García, Mauricio González, Iván Marcos, Ricardo Santana, Ana Vallés y Hugo Portas. Voz contratenor: Ramón Vázquez.: Espacio escénico e iluminación: Baltasar Patiño. Madrid. Teatro Fernán Gómez. 12 de mayo de 2008.

Como sugiere el título que encabeza este comentario, extraído de una de las múltiples disquisiciones sobre la naturaleza humana en las que ocasionalmente se enzarzan los protagonistas de Animales artificiales, todo este espectáculo va enderezado a resaltar la maraña de paradojas, o sería mejor decir de dislates, o de despropósitos, que so capa de normas de conducta comúnmente aceptadas, determinan nuestro comportamiento cotidiano dándole un barniz de falsa respetabilidad a cambio de coartar nuestra espontaneidad y las manifestaciones libres de un cierta inclinación innata para el placer, para el juego y para la exteriorización de lo instintivo.

Pero no hay que alarmarse; los pasajes dialogados sólo ocupan sólo un lugar secundario en el teatro de Ana Vallés, y se sirve de ellos para parodiar la solemnidad de los discursos de "profundo" calado filosófico, a la vez que actúan de contrapunto jocoso, de antítesis de los mensajes cifrados en clave de imágenes, de una plasticidad fresca, rozagante, que son el núcleo esencial de la pieza que comentamos. Porque Ana Vallés es sobre todo una creadora de ambientes (como ya tiene acreditado en sus anteriores montajes), que en esta ocasión sume a la escena en una densa atmósfera onírica a mitad de camino entre las imágenes surrealistas de Buñuel y las fantasías circenses de Fellini, convirtiendo a sus personajes en figuras del sueño o del subconsciente, a las que un geniecillo caprichoso y burlón sometiera a deformaciones grotescas en un intento de poner a prueba nuestros hábitos perceptivos y nuestra maltrecha capacidad de asombro.

Haciendo gala de una extraordinaria libertad compositiva, la obra se articula en una serie de acciones o cuadros que vienen a representar de manera desenfadada y un tanto caótica las escaramuzas del pensamiento racional para imponer su criterio: las infructuosas tentativas del "Cisne con sobrero" para instruir al chimpancé, o las de la "Payasa del taburete" por escapar "al abrazo del desnudo". Una racionalidad de salón, en cualquier caso, nostálgica del decadente glamour de una aria de ópera, del mustio y desvaído aroma que destila un número de music hall, o del patético y ridículo ritual del five o'clock tea.

¿Provocación? ¿Trasgresión? ¿Irreverencia? algo de ello hay en este montaje de Ana Vallés; pero sobre todo ironía, parodia de las formas vicarias de una cultura elitista que cierra los cuerpos y las mentes a una genuina y abierta relación con nuestro ser más intimo y con nuestros semejantes. Una crítica que nunca es agria o violenta, antes bien proviene de una mirada indulgente y comprensiva de la naturaleza humana. Un espectáculo, en fin, hecho de imágenes, que apela -como en ocasiones anteriores- a la fibra sensorial del espectador y a su dimensión imaginativa, y que encierra una nada desdeñable carga de energía liberadora.

Gordon Craig. 14-V-08