Everything takes place in an academy for eternal repeaters which could be located in any urban periphery of the globe, but which feels the urban cone, the suburbs, of Buenos Aires on all four sides. An underground, hermetic landscape of agglomeration of objects and condensed air which is both an auscultation of human nature and an x-ray of a society, Argentina, which has allowed more than half the country for many years. The work was created in October last year, just before Javier Milei won the elections.
This is the historical moment in which this production created at the Sala Beckett in Barcelona, which also includes one of the most powerful theaters in Argentina, the electric and dangerous theater of Sergio Boris, is inserted, and this in a context transatlantic and mixed with the Catalan company El Eje. Beings who, left and forgotten by a society obsessed with the individual, meritocracy, success and consumption, decide not to play the game.
For the Spanish viewer, the space may recall the attic of La Zaranda. A place full of torn and rusty objects of memory. Chairs, papers, clocks that don’t move, shelves with boxes, aloe vera destroyed by lack of water and other little forgotten gadgets, left by the hand of God, make up this universe. Only a few small desks suggest that this was once an active academy. Next to one of the offices, we see a rickety radiator with a makeshift bathtub where the characters shower as best they can. The postcard is sordid, that of an abandoned social class where there is no future in sight nor any social advancement that is worthwhile.
In this universe there are five beings who have just left the hospitalized director of the academy. Her husband Aguiles (Sebastián Mogordoy) is lost in the new situation, an eternal student Elian (David Teixidó) dresses him and takes care of him. Then appears Carlos, brother of Aguiles (Eric Balbás), a former student (María Hernández), who comes to take charge of the academy, and Aguiles’ sister (Cristina Mariño), a nurse who managed the internment of the director.
That’s the plot, a plot that the viewer will understand little by little but which matters little, to put it mildly. The essence of this anti-intellectual theater lies in what happens to these beings among themselves, in the way they are attacked by waves of frustration, envy, desire and helplessness in this liminal space.
A hot and dangerous theater that seeks fire
Thus, on stage, we will see beings who, from their mess, from this misery without possible resolution, rebel by splashing around. They are beings like Bartleby. by Herman Melville, that of “I would rather not do it”; or Robert Walser’s Jacob Von Gunten, but taken to an America that breathes according to different parameters than the developed West. Its director, Sergio Boris, after a performance, confirmed to this newspaper that the play was inspired by Walser’s book. Likewise, the influence of the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch, an important thinker of the seventies for Latin America who advocated the end of the superiority of European rational thought over indigenous American cultures, was also highlighted.
The space of the work is true that it imitates Walser’s Benjamenta Institute, where Jacob decides to be the last stage, to exist and not to prosper, but the proposal is laminated to the extreme unction by a universe of its own, Buenos Aires and very Peronist. . Euphoria and disappointment He is a Walser, but put to the test by Witold Gombrowicz, this Pole who found his homeland in Argentina and who defended an eternal state of rebellion against Nietzsche’s superman. Faced with the importance of establishing oneself, Boris, like Witold, defends a state of perpetual immaturity. Something that is linked to the thinking of Kusch, who always spoke of resentment as the driving root of resistance movements. Boris’s theater resists the European canon, where representation tends towards solemnity and where the text reigns over all things.
This is what these characters are like who have been denied a future but who no longer want one either, always talking about renovating the house, about careers they know won’t happen, lying to others and to themselves, trying to make a profit. as much as they can, being, as they say there, pure “chantas”. And at the same time, characters of overflowing humanity and fragility who, finally, care about each other, desire and love each other.
The director plays with them, creating a real dramaturgy of bodies in space, finding in the lowest and most pathetic signs of the human being, a beauty which goes beyond decadence and plunges into the human condition. Boris’s theater plays with contrasts and confronts us with a sewer where beauty and hope shine. As Valle-Inclán has already done here in his own way or as La Zaranda de Sherry vinegar For his people, Boris is looking laterally for answers to an incomprehensible world, to a society – post-capitalist – which is unbearable; and an Argentina facing the precipice of having left a good part of its society in poverty.
And he does it with a theater artaudienwhere the “themes of the play” are pulverized and explode in the bonds of characters who lie at will. Boris’s theater is a theater of hot, dangerous bodies, in search of fire. A theater in which Boris applies electric shocks to these lost beings on stage and where the spectator watches with astonishment their shipwrecks with each attack, with each tsunami that the director introduces.
A round trip theater
But this space also takes us to other places, to the labyrinth of Old, alone and whore which Boris created in 2011 and directed for seven years in Buenos Aires, or the most recent Artaud which was seen at the Madrid Autumn Festival in 2019 and which was also displayed on billboards in Argentina for many years. A theater based on actors and a show born from improvisation and research. A line of action that does not exist in Spain. Sergio Boris is the heir to one of the main veins of experimental theater which renewed the Buenos Aires scene in the 1990s. He is the disciple of one of the greats, Ricardo Bartís, who, from a small theater in the Palermo district, the Sportivo Teatral, changed the course of the stage in his country and in a large part of Latin America.
One of the attractions of the production is being able to see the Spanish actors play in this register. Only one of the performers, Mogordoy, is from Buenos Aires. Seeing how hundreds of principles of Hispanic acting (psychologisms, composition, focus) explode in these actors is pure joy. It is a pleasure to be able to see how they are released under parameters where the important thing is not what is said, but the relationship with the eyes of the actor in front of them, with space, with the lateral and with the elusive, with the thousands of meanings and implications contained in any spoken sentence.
The El Eje company was born in 2013. Balbás, Hernández and Mar Pawlowsky, fresh from the Institut del Teatre, formed this group always attentive to contemporary creation and interested in this other Argentine theater. They were the ones who suggested that Boris take part in a creative project. Boris, attached to his theatrical philosophy, no longer offers a ready-made work, but has been working with them for months on a creation starting from scratch. The work was premiered last year at the Estación Alta in Girona. Today, Sala Beckett in Barcelona has taken it back. Thank goodness, because we are facing one of the most interesting and ambitious transoceanic experiments of recent decades.
In other operations of this nature, large companies like Javier Daulte with Are you there? (2008) or Daniel Veronese with Women dreamed of horses (2007), arrived on national stages with ready-made works adapted for a Spanish cast. Projects in which we even ended up reproaching the actors for the difference with the Argentine production. Not here. Here Euphoria and disappointment It’s a joy to see the actors inhabit other places, lodging estrangement and anti-solemnity in their bodies. Boris offers a show in which he plays without control, with a theater where the show is always in danger and where the three Spanish members bring it to fruition. Full stop for Mogordoy who comes from another planet.
Days after this work premiered last year, Javier Milei came to power, becoming president of a devastated nation. After seeing the montage, it is impossible not to cross the work with current Argentinian reality. On the one hand, we can perhaps better understand the extreme vote of the population in the last elections. But on the other hand, a certain feeling of dread about the future prevails. In a few days, on October 24, as part of the Buenos Aires International Festival (FIBA), it will be premiered Euphoria and disappointment oddly enough, at the Beckett Theater. It is impossible to know what resonance this work will have in an Argentina led by the new Milei government for almost a year. What would be desirable is for the history of relations between Spain and Boris to continue. His theater is one of the most powerful theaters created “in Spanish,” as they say today.
