After its premiere in Mar del Plata with a full room in all its functions, All that salt on the skin is presented this weekend in Buenos Aires. The work, her debut as author of mercedes mendezis a joint creation with a group of artists from Mar del Plata, made up of Cecilia Dondero at the address, Paula Gonzalez in acting and Florentina Peralta in management assistance.
The protagonist of this one-person show is a single mother who finds out that her six-year-old daughter had an accident at school and was rushed to the hospital. The play is that woman’s journey to her daughter, her desperate attempt to connect with her. Her thoughts revolve around topics such as motherhood and its pain, gender inequality, helplessness, but also the possibility of finding love and beauty in the least expected places.
All that salt on the skin It emerged first from writing, in an investigation that the author carried out in different workshops with the teachers Mauricio Kartun, Mariana Chaud, Andres Gallina and santiago loza. “Thus he arrived at the final version of a text that crosses autofiction with situational monologue structures and a post-dramatic register, with a narrative voice”, explains the director of the play.
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Cecilia Donderograduated from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Tandil and also trained with important teachers, such as Ricardo Bartis and Marcelo Savignoneamong many others, received the text of mendez in August 2021: “Mercedes shares with us Paula Gonzalez and me his text with the encouragement that, if we were interested, we would put it on stage. His idea was for Paula to direct and I to act, roles that we have been occupying for the 20 years that we have been doing theater together. We both read her text and we immediately fell in love with her, and Pau asked me to act it and that I direct it. I accepted the challenge, full of questions, but with a lot of desire ”, she tells Infobae Cultura.
“This is my first experience directing a one-man show,” Cecilia explains, which opened in 2015 pathways like veins and in 2019 a children’s play called Ombo’s journey–. When reading All that salt on the skin, it reached me directly and deeply, it moved me very much. I felt identified in various situations as a daughter, mother, wife, friend, sister, I remembered situations that have happened to friends and sisters. We have all gone through family traumas, heartbreaks, fears, anguish, gender inequality. Many women living motherhood in solitude, finding love and refuge in the least expected places, in the embrace of other women, and discovering beauty and meaning in moments of daily life. I dare to say that Pau already Florentina Peralta, our great and indispensable assistant, the same thing happened to them. The text is universal, I think it touches all of us”.
—What are the challenges posed by the text of All that salt on the skin to define a staging and acting direction? How did you resolve the different moments through which the protagonist’s imaginary dialogue with her daughter goes through?
—The challenge was to think about what things this woman does while her head doesn’t stop, while tragedy begins to invade her head and body. Who is she talking to? Are you looking for an interlocutor, someone to help you, to feel accompanied by her? How to inhabit and represent the different spaces? How to deal with the distortion of time, temporal ellipses, the present and the absent? How to accompany that internal chaos? How to make present what is not there?
The show puts the focus on the moment before the misfortune, when we feel that it is lurking, that it is imminent. We put the focus there and try to use all the elements of the theater: light, pulse, sound, the body of the actress to generate a dialogue with the public about what it is to feel our hearts in our mouths, how we react, what scenarios imagine and what conclusions we can draw afterwards. There is something cardiac that we try to maintain throughout the work and ideally we seek that this state of tension reaches the viewer.
We worked for a year and a half in constant rehearsals to define the acting code and the staging that best dialogues with the contemporary record. During the research process, we tried different techniques. In this way, they experimented with the mask, physical actions and the sensory register. There was a search from the sound as one more narrative element, the rhythmic, we were accompanied by a live violinist. Finally, he decided on an abstract staging that, based on a simple sound intervention and a play of light and shadow and with slides, explores a wide and deep mental universe and, at the same time, reaches the viewer in an intimate way. This construction of language with the slides helped to address temporary ellipses and changes of scenery.
—Did you think a lot about the idea of putting it on or was it something that came up from the beginning?
—As soon as we started rehearsing, I knew that the staging was going to be minimalist, I never imagined large sets and objects, nor many colors. I knew that the focus would be on the body of the actress, on her performance, on the minimum of her actions and gestures. I wanted something simple to accompany that woman, that story, that text already so loaded with images, emotions and sensations. The idea of the actress being close to the people appeared immediately, creating an intimate, subtle, small, uterine environment. At first I imagined audiovisual projections, holograms that go through her, abstract drawings made by hand and animated, subtle images that accompany the states of this woman, that generate scenarios in a not so figurative way.
And an analog slide projector came to me at the right moment, which belonged to my grandmother Porota. I investigated the lights and shadows, cutting paper, with scissors, a cutter, by hand, each miniature thing was transformed when projected on the theater wall, on Pau’s body, and gave us new information. It was a lot of trial and error, trial and error to put together the slide script.
It closed the white and black, the lights and the shadows. Projection, everything is projection: light, sound, what she projects onto her daughter, the projection of what can happen, of promises as pleas, of tragedy…
*All that salt on the skin It will be presented on Saturday, April 29 at 9:00 p.m. and on Sunday, April 30 at 7:00 p.m. at Casa Sofía (Fitz Roy 1327, CABA).
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