The Count of Torrefiel returned from his previous job, Interior image. The company comes back re-armed and focused on its essence. presented The light of a lake at the TNT festival in Terrassa (Barcelona), in a crowded Teatro Alegría. A piece with a more manageable format and production. After years of internationalization and large productions, El Conde took refuge in its new Valencian warehouse and emerged with a beautiful, intimate and contemplative piece that continues to explore the possibilities of its own stage language. Furthermore, the piece is a marvel of device where the scene becomes a body with its own entity and comes to life. His brain, speech, his arteries action and his heart, a moving sound.
Since the day you heard in the headphones Atrocity Exhibition by Joy Division in the 80s, the day you heard on your cell phone my dance factory by Joe Crepúsculo in 2013. From Margaret Thatcher’s Manchester to pre-15M Barcelona. It is to this era, to this sentimental education, that The Count’s new play addresses. He does this through four stories that make up a film that will never be seen on stage, but rather imagined. “It’s a film,” says the voiceover of Tanya Beyeller, director of the company with Pablo Gisbert, at the beginning of the piece in front of an empty space.
But for the duration of the play, no images from the film will be projected. Instead, the house’s trademark spoken and projected texts will take us deeper into the kind of intersecting lives that make up the film. And an empty space will be transformed, with panels and various objects, to bring out the mental images of these texts. The scene pulses and rubs against the word, the story. A friction that aims to create the image inside each spectator, thus transforming the audience’s brain into real editing machines.
Even if the texts can also recall the short and precise sentence of The left-handed woman by Peter Handke ―a book which cleaned the literature of the 70s of its flourishes―, the comparison with the little Austrian novel is more relevant at the level of the scenic proposal and not only at the level of the texts. Just as Handke strips the story as much as he can of artifices and superfluous elements, The Count, in a spectacle society addicted to images, hollow drama and fallacious emotion, reacts and eliminates his proposed mediations – there is no actor saying the word or interpreting it―, theatrical conflicts and Aristotelian structures.
Finally, the perception when reading Handke and when viewing the Count’s work is similar. The reader and the spectator have the sensation of rediscovering something very old, of hearing, of seeing, of experiencing, something almost forgotten. The image of the full audience, motionless, listening, reading the texts and seeing how the actions unfold on stage is very powerful. Nothing happens on stage and at the same time everything happens. It is a theater prior to or parallel to Greek tragedy. It’s another theater.
The texts follow in the footsteps of those who saw the birth of the company, dry, intelligent texts, open to diatribe, but attached to the story of stories of individuals, of “characters who have no image and do not are just words,” as the text says. says of the work, “they are like drops of water crossed by light which makes them shine for a moment then brings them back to the depths of anonymity”.
There is the story of three 23 year old boys in Manchester in 1995, how, after a Massive Attack concert – the impressive combination of the descriptive text of the concert with the theme Angel of the group at full speed― decide to go to the temple of the musician of the moment, the legendary New Osborne. There, tripped through, these three young people will discover the sound of their time: “Simple, constant and repetitive music, without variations, without complexities. Music that has no words, music that doesn’t tell you anything, music that doesn’t intellectualize, music that doesn’t confuse you, music that penetrates you and, above all, strong music. A serious, rhythmic and no-nonsense hit. A continuous rhythm that recalls the simplicity of time and at the same time the complexity of time.
I am copying this long text here to try to express its power, a text which will end up saying: “A wave of people shake their bodies at the same rhythm. They invoke the complexity of time and dance wanting to disappear. With this simple, low, constant beat, they invoke the categorical rhythm of the universe and the beating of the heart. This first story, followed by three others, is fundamental to the play. He tells us about this past where a generation discovered and opened up to the world, as others will do from now on. In the same way that he places a mirror in which the spectator confronts the inexorable passage of time.
From there will come other stories that will play with each other on the tenuous border between fiction and reality. A bank employee who, in a lost cinema in Athens, sees the film of these same young people from Manchester who, when they get old, ruin their love story. And a trans marine biologist who reads a novel about this bank employee who really went to the cinema to have hidden homosexual relations with a colleague and who ends up being murdered by the owner of the theater. So many truncated love stories, which are born from the text and come to life on stage through the light, the action and the sound which suggest and highlight them.
At the end will come the fourth story, which takes place in the future. It is not a question here of recounting the work either. Let us simply point out that perhaps the latter, which functions as an epilogue of meta-artistic reflection, is the least nuclear of the work. It is perhaps the brilliance of the piece, the contrast with the tone of the rest of the work, which is none other than the distant and sad look at the passing of time, a time which breaks and dissolves loves. , but that The Count saves. fatalism with a letter from the grandmother to the trans biologist where from old age she advises and warns against this Cainite world which will try to make you give in and domesticate you. “Don’t be afraid,” the grandmother said to her granddaughter. A text by pure Thomas Bernhard, if not in style, then at least in substance.
This room is perhaps one of the most intimate in the company. To do this, as we said, El Conde returned to the essence, the texts bring together the writing of this founding work published in 2011, Observe how fatigue beats thoughtthe production exudes a pure “homemade” style and also achieves a sonic mastery accessible to no one in this country today. The scene of the three large metal panels vibrating and amplified until the last rites is what comes closest to the levels of the Dune by David Lynch in a theater like we’ve never seen before. The heart of this piece is in the sound, this is where the company beats, suffers and shares.
The light of a lake It was created this summer at the Barcelona GREC Festival at the Teatre Lliure. Inexplicably, it happened in the small room. TNT, with a budget 20 times lower than that of the departmental festival, was able to better understand and take care of this room which needs height and space to breathe and emerge. It will arrive at the Condeduque Contemporary Culture Center next January. TNT will continue the program until this Sunday when the long-awaited premieres of such established performing arts references as Nilo Gallego or Norberto Llopis and new emerging figures like Alberto Cortés or Monte-Isla will take place.
This new piece by El Conde and the question it asks remains in the memory of the festival, which although very generational, can be extrapolated to others: who are we now, who were we 25 years ago , which in 2013 when Joe Crepúsculo sang about having “a drum inside, a discotheque, a dance factory”, as the work itself quotes.
Ian Curtis, singer of Joy Division, also mentioned, committed suicide at the age of 24. The Cure, meanwhile, has just released a new single after more than 16 years, alone. The album will arrive in November, Song of a Lost World. In the single, Robert Smith sings a litany that could well be the soundtrack to this song by The Count: “And everything stops, we were always sure that / we would never change, but everything stops / and we close eyes to sleep / and a boy and a girl dream / who dream that the world is only a dream.
