El Conde de Torrefiel

La Plaza

Archive 2018
Centre Pompidou
octoberoct 10 – 13
1/4

Conceived and devised by El Conde de Torrefiel, in collaboration with the performers
Directed by Tanya Beyeler & Pablo Gisbert
Text, Pablo Gisbert
With Gloria March Chulvi, Albert Pérez Hidalgo, Mónica Almirall Batet, Nicolas Carbajal, Amaranta Velarde, David Mallols and a group of Brussels-based dancers
Lighting, Ana Rovira
Set, prop and costume design, Blanca Añón and the performers
Sound, Adolfo Fernández García

An El Conde de Torrefiel production ; Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels)
A coproduction with Alkantara Festival (Lisbon) ; Maria Matos Teatro Municipal (Lisbon) ; Black Box teater (Oslo) ; Festival de Marseille ; GREC – Festival de Barcelona ; FOG Triennale Milano Performing Arts ; HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) ; Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt ; Kunstencentrum Vooruit (Ghent) ; Wiener Festwochen ; Zürcher Theater Spektakel ; Centre Pompidou (Paris) ; and Festival d’Automne à Paris // In association with Les Spectacle vivants – Centre Pompidou (Paris) ; and Festival d’Automne à Paris
With support from Onda
First performed on 5 May 2018 at Kaaitheater (Brussels) as part of Kunstenfestivaldesarts

El Conde de Torrefiel’s latest show evokes the image of a town square peopled with undefined faces and bodies. These individuals move around the square, forming a living portrait that the audience both views and reads. These same, projected words speak volumes about the contemporary world, and its blurring of all points of reference.

The town square is a public place. A place where people cross each other’s paths, without ever meeting. A space in which different forms of discourse can be heard, without ever converging. And where the mass of people gathered there resembles a mass of solitude. In their preceding work, La posibilidad que desaparece frente al paisaje (Possibilities that disappear before a landscape), presented at the Festival d’Automne, Tanya Beyeler and Pablo Gisbert uncovered layers of history and barbarism buried deep beneath the apparent tranquility of landscape. In La Plaza, the space continues to reflect time, orientated, this time around, in the direction of the future. The unexpected, the unpredictable is at the heart of this new production. Once again, this Barcelona collective investigates the way we see things, our point of view. But in the face of the all-conquering selfie, what exactly is a point of view? The show also deals with the no-face book, a space peopled by anonymous, faceless individuals. They occupy the town square and inhabit the stage, turning it into a living portrait. Audience members find themselves becoming readers of projected texts, made up of words never proffered - tangible proof of the current malaise in today’s world.
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Estimated running time : 1h30
Performed in Spanish, with French subtitles

In the same place