Bitef
No shading. Total light next to blackest darkness. Light sweeps through space like a star through the universe, where life gestates and moderates: movement. There is nothing more than what is. Matter, elasticity, flow. It becomes clear that abstractions are only conventions, references to a known linguistic system. It is the presence of a world unequipped with the power of thought. Everything obeys inherited impulses, prior instructions. Everything gives up at the first sign of resistance. There is no resort even to mythological tradition; it is hereditary, the genetic code, signals. Nothing is carried through, nothing destroyed. It is the series of parts itself that forgets yet accumulates, recovers, lifts and moves through an unshakeable will to develop and grow. The structure unfolds through an aesthetic based on the psychology and personality of LA FURA DELS BAŰS and on a narrative progression uniting from and substance. These two concepts - form and substance - which are simply intellectual speculation, affect each other as they dance. Substance is form and vice versa. Here, the forms spring, to a large extent, from prior motivations, collateral to the work, from the psychology of LA FURA DELS BAUS, their professional evolution, their expectations. And above the forms, which they themselves at the same time release, revolves the stage setting that confuses roles and eliminates the borderline between audience and actors although it is not a question of involving the spectator. It is the performance itself that abolishes the conventional pósi'tions of actors and public. It is the performance that escapes and grows in closed areas, sheds, factories, shopping centres, funeral parlours (Galileo St., Madrid, October 1983), disused prisons (Badajoz, September 1985), buildings under construction, marquees, building sites, bus depots (Almeria, 1986), fairgrounds, etc. Within this stage setting members of the audience arc paired with the group of six automatons that open and close the show. The show points out the limitations of perceiving things by intelligence and reason alone. It is aimed at an inner fibre of the spectators, the substratum where everything is reduced to life and death, laughter or tears, grotesque or solemn. The show merely narrates a huge game, alternating contrasts, the shock of conflicting energy, but it also spins a precise allegorical tale in which the players’ language and visual expression originate the narrative
situation. The message is to be taken as an ex tra. We always know, what we’re talking about. We need no further explanation. We always know what we want to say because it has already been said. Which is why this show is about tautology, redundancies, metalanguage. And just as it is a work outside the orbit established by theatre, it is outside dramatic art. But it is not just a linear progression. Multiple aspects are activated that give life to others in radial, development and diversification that inject movement and duration towards a feeling of permanence that comes to a head and withers. Then the music stops, the house lights go up and we see that after all it was nothing but acting. These were fragments, a series of little lives and deaths hungrily justling each other in a reflection of the strange sense and assemblies of reality. Blood, undertones, violence, moving shadows. The show comes to an end with a desolate cadence of a wind instrument and a muted chord web gravitating towards the reawakening of the automatons that were present at the beginning and now remain in their function as scenery. □
The Work The action on stage takes into account the surface area required by SUZ/O/SUZ. It needs to be an open space giving a sense of direction so as to include five circular scenes, three frontal situations and one mixed. After presenting the concept of the robots, the automatons and the creatures going round in a circle, the attention is focussed on the stage through the PROCESSION, the first of the three NEXUSES. The PROCESSION takes one minute. This is so that the actors can strip while they reach stage level; they, like the members of the audience they have dragged along with them, are harshly lit by the frontal play of spotlights set up under the proscenium. The composition is conventional. A commonplace. Stage and spectator. Auditorium and audience. At a height of two and a half metres is the stage platform (4x12 m) with