GALICIA HOXE. 07.02.2010

The Black Swan

Sometimes we get so bored that it feels like time does not move. It gets stuck. Sundays are the days to get bored. Pina Bausch was a German dancer, choreographer and dance teacher, and one of the greatest figures of contemporary international dance. She was very thin, like a black swan.

There is a magnificent park in Betanzos, called The Pastime, full of mysteries, caves, and passageways. I always liked this city to pass time quietly, to dream about black seagulls and go to bars at night. Children, when they are bored to death, do naughty and malicious pranks in order to escape so much mediocrity. The philosopher Sartre was bored and he invented a healing, terrible and crystalline "nausea". Hope inhabits boredom, because after being married we want to get divorced. After living love, we want to experiment hatred.

The stage, in Pina Bausch plays, turned into a strange dance hall, where anything could happen. A toad could kiss a lion. A fly could make a hippopotamus fall in love. Old people carried their biography written on their humble, worn out bodies. Expressionist painting covered all masks with the shine of a black moon. Boredom makes young people get into drugs and alcoholism. Death violently and patiently pushes life. In Pina Bausch shows, everything appears assembled from small episodes. There is not a logical and lineal structure. The result is an intense and vitalist collage. Kierkegaard brings boredom closer to melancholy. If three cats sat on a sofa, they would have lots of things to talk about, but they would not talk about anything. They would watch TV all day and all night long, waiting for the economic crisis to go somewhere else. When we despair, we are more beautiful than the whales in the sea.

Fun boredom

The new play by Matarile, entitled Cerrado por Aburrimiento , could start saying "Theatre Company for Sale". Even though it is a goodbye, it could also be an arrival to a place that does not exist. We even get bored watching this show, but it is "fun boredom". The sun enters the stage and the light is blinding, destructive to our eyes. The best way to say goodbye is to say "hello, how are you? Do you want to go and buy an ice-cream and a white umbrella?"

The director and actress, Ana Vallés is also a black, melancholic swan. When we had to admire maps at school and learn world geography, this was extremely difficult and unbelievably boring. It is best to learn other things, like riding a horse, withstand doing theatre or dance at night. In Cerrado por Aburrimiento there is room to do "a review of theatre critics". They very much deserve it, for thinking that they can pass judgements and paint things either in black or white. All actors are on the stage and each one of them engages in a different thing. They are together but scattered. I always liked this "air of madness" that Matarile's plays have. Energy mixes with the lack of energy. Enthusiasm lives together with tiredness, with irony and with absurdity. Sometimes, rather than doing theatre, it seems that they are doing cinema with pieces of old blankets.

A theatre company "is up for sale" and we could also sell all the hopes, all its life efforts, its pledges. We could throw out of the window all the creativity, all the cigarette smoke, all the sunlight. At the end of the film -and of the boredom- there would only be rain left, lots and lots of rain.

. Lupe Gómez .

Cerrado por Aburrimiento�, shared experience

Primer Acto nº 331 2009

On the 27th of November 2009, Matarile premiered Cerrado por Aburrimiento in Teatro Colón in A Coruña, a philosophical post-drama whose stage parataxis reflects on essential questions and, therefore, moving ones: �Why do we do theatre, Juan? What for?� asks Ana Vallés on the stage to Xan Cejudo.

Matarile arrives at this show with a very defined stage language and style. Drama actresses and actors, dancers, and performers, who make up an existential and existentialist mosaic without resorting to any more fiction than that required to (re)present themselves on a stage, prioritising the shared experience with the audience above a passed on experience, prioritising driving energy above giving it meaning.

Amongst Matarile's latest works, this is the one that gives greater weight to Ana Vallés, who performs on the stage as director, actress, witness and spectator. Her questions and her artistic uneasiness take shape in what she says and in what she does, and also in what she asks her partners, like when she asks Xan Cejudo to sit at the table to eat some soup and recite a Pessoa poem for her about the mask and the face. Ana also de-constructs herself following a similar pattern to that in Truenos y Misterios (2007), coherent with the ventriloquist sketch that Marta Pazos and Antón Coucheiro performed in Illa Reunión (CDG, 2006), a tribute to their beginning in the puppet and object theatre, a reference to the always admired Kantor. She does it by turning into a dislocated doll, stage object, with her black wig and extraordinary movements with which she abandons Ana Vallés at times.

The stage is a landscape. There is no set design that can camouflage it and transform it into a fictional dramatic space. There are real objects, some of them �like the large table� propped with wheels. The pumpkin, from Ana and Baltasar's vegetable plot, does its performance in equal terms and introduces the topic of contemplation. We contemplate the human landscape that moves on the stage and within its limits, just like they contemplate each other and they contemplate us. The different artistic and geographical backgrounds of the people that make up this show �Argentina, Asturias, Canary Islands, Madrid and Galicia� merge thematically and through a language in which irony stands out. Ana crosses the stage holding a placard: � Theatre Company for Sale �. Alba Fernández, José Campanari, Mónica García, Mauricio González, Ricardo Santana, Xan Cejudo and Ana Vallés are floating islands that sometimes touch each other, cherry trees that intertwine their branches while shedding their ephemeral flowers. Baltasar Patiño's lighting and sound space are also actors. Patiño makes up lights as he makes up sounds, some of them as fascinating as the horizontal lines that cross the stage and get lost while Mónica García performs the dance of the fall.

From Galicia, with a peculiar humour and branding, together with an international artistic dialogue, we attend the consolidation of a heterodox theatre of stage composition. Matarile and Chévere have opened up paths on stage, such as the ones that ESAD in Galicia is opening up from training, in order to carry out new attempts to renew theatre.

. Afonso Becerra .