Exactly 20 years ago, Eduardo Haro Tecglen, critic of the newspaper El País, published a text on the premiere at the Abadía Theater of La la la la la by Roger Bernat, enfant terrible of Catalan theater at that time. The review was titled: Avant-garde, nothing. And it began with a laconic: “Avant-garde theater is more than 100 years old and has caused its creators a lot of suffering. » Marta Pazos, a Galician designer who made a career within the Voadora company until starting her solo career in 2020, has been playing for some time with this adjective that the cultural press has already attributed to her as a sticker which in theory identifies.
The term avant-garde is broad and transversal, but perhaps it can be summed up as art that radically breaks with previous forms and concepts. Teglen de Bernat said: “The avant-garde must have an internal logic, a reason even for unreason. I don’t find them in this work.” And, in a way, the same thing happens to the person who writes this with this piece.
Marta Pazos presented a proposal which, on paper, may seem disruptive. A play about the great myth of France, Joan of Arc, a peasant woman who, at the beginning of the 15th century, led the troops of Charles VII and defeated the English during the Hundred Years’ War. A pubescent girl dressed as a man who found herself in the hands of an enemy who burned her at the stake after a trial during which the Inquisition accused her of being “a heretic, a witch and a magician, a fortune teller and a false prophet.”
In addition, Pazos gives a vision of the myth, highlighting the most important aspects weird and speaks fluently the Maid of Orléans, emphasizing that during this trial she was burned for her trans condition: “You dressed as a man as if it were a divine command, and not only that, you spoke and behaved like a man, “You made fun of your femininity because of the influence of black magic and occult practices”, the judge will tell him in the text that Sergio Martínez Vila wrote for the room.
The play takes place in a minimal setting, a space created by one of the leaders of current scenography, Max Glaenzel, where burgundy red reigns. Pure and colorful aesthetic, trademark of the Pazos factory. The costumes are both retro-futuristic and classic, designed by designer Leandro Cano. A suggestive wardrobe where the feminine and masculine are treated with a fine thread. And the choreography, designed by Belén Martí Lluch (Mucha Muchacha), is perhaps the most important element of the proposal.
In this elongated space, with a panoramic cinemascope view, symbolic Joans will appear, dancing, evoking tragedy with premonitory movements. Joan of Arc will appear, played by a young and powerful Joana Vilapuig (Self-tape, red bracelets) and Carlos, the dauphin of France, a character full of finesse played by Macarena García (The call, The Messiah). The cast is completed by five other women, there are no men, for whom the company organized a casting and which includes known faces like Ana Polvorosa. (Aida) or Lucia Juárez (Murder and adolescence) and other young performers like Katalin Arana (dancer of Led Silhouette), Georgina Amorós and Bea de Paz.
With these wickers, Pazos built a biopic with a strong, somewhat kitsch aesthetic where the soundtrack created by the Portuguese Hugo Torres (former member of Voadora) is also omnipresent throughout the work. Music based on electronics but which plays with a mixture of genres and in which there will be more classical compositions where the violin or the piano predominates and others closer to the musical where Joana Vilapuig and Macarena García will sing. Yes, here it is also sung like in the latest films dedicated to the figure of Joan of Arc by Bruno Dumont.
We therefore end up with a disrupted scene, where dance mixes with biopic and the musical, and this has a declared aesthetic desire. All the wickers of interdisciplinary stage renewal. But on stage, more than the revival, something else is happening. The first problem is the choreography intended to structure the symbolism and poetic language of the piece. Not all actresses are dancers, but that doesn’t matter. There are many examples where the body is worked on stage with actors and the result is magnificent. The problem is not the technique.
The problem is that this dance often illustrates the stage, with group choreographies that represent the dramatic action. A good example is the battle where the dancers divided into two groups on each side of the stage approach each other making warlike and martial gestures. The scene illustrates, decorates, but does not have its own language. In other cases, the movements will aim to have a symbolic value that points to the mystical transcendence of the character, but again they will be flat choreographies, with a devastating spatial simplicity and which will add neither strength nor polysemy.
Another problem is Pazos’s use of visual semantics. For example, we see on stage, in this burgundy red space, an actress waving a gigantic flag of the same color, the electronic music tries to enhance the moment, but the image is more typical of an advertisement for the fashion brand Miu Miu as a theater of scenic research. Everything is turned upside down towards a digital platform aesthetic where transcendence is generally hollow, but with a lot of volume and which also uses hackneyed images whose original meaning has been erased.
Another example. At the beginning of the play, when Catherine of Alexandria, a martyr born in Turkey in the 4th century, appears to Joan, more than a martyr, she remembers the lady of the forest of the lord of the ringsan elf at the microphone who looks like Galadriel herself dressed in turquoise. It is not that there is no correlation with the historical narrative or with the iconography from which the myth comes. Nobody claims that. The disadvantage is that the universe displayed by Pazos is hollow, typical of a post-cathodic society clinging to a pretension where semantics are replaced by gesture, where we scratch and where Netflix appears.
The artist maintains that the motivation for his latest theater is to create threshold spaces and experiences that connect the divine with the human and that speak to characters not historically privileged for gender reasons. Pazos has already built a Othello told by Desdemona and Emilia, and an article on the Greek poet Sappho. This season, in addition, the National Drama Center will premiere the Orlando by Virginia Woolf with a superb cast. She is experiencing a sweet moment in her career as a performing artist. Pazos masters the stage box and, as in this same work he demonstrates by playing with the heights and depths of space, he has the ability to play in space. But delving into a myth like that of Joan of Arc, full of blood, patriotism, dogma and mysticism, and bringing it back to the present day is another story.
There is a claim in the play for a different youth in which trans and fluid sensitivity is present, something that can be felt in the casting itself. There’s even a relevant androgynous final dance from Bea de Paz. There are also actresses who mark their territory like Macarena García and others who make their mark like Vilapuig. There is also an investigation by author Martínez Vila into the trial that puts some dots over some i’s in why Juana was burned.
But the proposition is flat, the structure of the linear story and the overly micronized voices on stage create a feeling of boxed and distant theater. But above all this Juana is bothered by the use of the image and the hollow sign. At times, you don’t know if you’re watching a live commercial or a theater. Teglen said the vanguard must have an internal reason. It is not clear what the reason for this last theater in Pazos is.
