A few months ago Mabel wrote to me. We had met at a workshop last summer. She tells me that she is part of a group that did their training at the Timbre 4 school, and that part of the initial group wanted to reformulate the material from the montage they had made. And that they had a premiere date in the Boedo room: it was a month and a half away. They wanted to propose that I direct them.
Those Sundays we were doing The pigeon houseof Victoria Hladilo in that same theater in Boedo. One Sunday I sat in the empty room for a while before giving room, and I looked at the space as if it were the first time. Images came to me. I lived in La Plata, and in that space I slept many nights among cats that came and went after rehearsals at dawn. We paint walls, we hang pans, we strip cables, we drink wine, we love each other, we peel, we laugh, we dream. It was the year 2001, and that still nameless space had incredible dynamics. Claudio Tolcachir, its director, opened the door of his house and the room, and everything was a powder keg. Of ideas, of laughter, of essays, of hours and hours of sharing. I learned there that theater is work. We did devil’s ham, lysistrataand another work that we only did in Mar del Plata called the tangle. We rehearsed it for a month in the early morning of a new hectic December. The theater was a protection. Home.
I told Mabel to get together with the group to get to know each other, and to give me all the material they had: texts, drafts, audiovisuals, photos, sketches, everything. We meet in a rather noisy pizzeria downtown and talk. The talk was short. Deep, frank and concrete. I asked them for a week to present them with a proposal. I immediately thought of The vocationof Cesar Brie, an essential book. Light table. I went back to my house and it wasn’t on the bedside table, but I found it right away. I reread it. That’s it.
Not so long ago, the following happened. After one of your classes, Cesar Brie He asked me if we could talk the next day after training. We sit in a taxi bar. Cease I ate a sandwich before going to rehearsal the tightrope walker. I was nervous and not hungry.
—I wanted to propose if you want to replace me in a play called The will. It’s about the life of simone weil.
Silence. He chews with blue eyes.
“I saw her,” I replied.
in the work, Cease he was flying in a harness.
“I’m too big for the harness,” I told him, and he smiled.
—And I wanted to propose if you want to do the old prince with me.
I had loved it!
And also if you want to join karamazov.
—And if you want to do a play that is going to take place in a train station.
He stopped chewing, smiled and looked at the time. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. I walked away confused, happy and proud. Cease I had always been trained, from reading his theoretical texts and watching his works, his documentaries. I said yes to everything. One week away from opening The will, fragments for Simone Weil in the new Town’s theater, the pandemic appeared. The confinement came, and Cease It was on the other side of the Atlantic. Since then we have not seen each other. We rehearsed the work of “the station” several times by zoom, with a whole group scattered around the world. Sometimes we write to each other. Last time I asked him if I could use some texts from The vocation for the setting of Timbre 4, and his response was absolutely generous. He built a new wooden theater in the mountains of northern Italy in a pandemic.
The following week we met with the group in a house to read. There was no light. We lit candles and before finishing the reading the light returned. There was commotion in the air. We worked hard and made An intimate journey after the end. The space, also new, is not made of wood. It is theater and it is a home, it is in the heart of Villa Crespo, and it is named after a grandmother, naca.
For this column, I asked the group to write a few words about how they feel about the process today, after going through so many stages. And in this constellation of phrases appear: “Knowing Cease, reading their texts, helped me to understand that the staging awakens the sensitivity of the actors, turning poetry into action”. “It is a process that we are giving ourselves. A possibility of nourishing a material and nourishing ourselves”. “A work is a test. What is thought is entangled with what emerges, with that diffuse thing that must be caught. We then thought of tangentially taking what that too real situation offered us. Because each creative instance wants to free itself from its birth.” “A great leap into the abyss, a great leap of faith that continues to be built.” “Disarm, put the scenes back together. Other places, other movements. The infinite possibilities of telling a text.” “The process was mutating from an idea of collapse to the idea of transformation from the texts of Cease. His own transformation from that aimless young man to the artist he is today. Images of joy, sadness, fear, challenges, on a dream plane.” “A journey of years in search of an ellipsis that stops the intensity of time.”
*An intimate journey after the enddramaturgy and direction of Manuel Vignau. From Sunday, March 19, every Sunday at 8:00 p.m. at Teatro ÑaCa (Julián Álvarez 924, Villa Crespo, CABA) Admission: $2,000 per Alternative.
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