I really relate to Mariano Pensotti. The first play I ever wrote and directed was Before the Kiss AKA the Creatures of Nostalgia, created in 2005 about lovers being monsters. It broke open the moment of an average kiss to examine the alchemical pathos determining a simple gesture, the mercurial greatness, the sulfuric charge, the salted waste, all present, all at once. In 2008 I created Narrator about our knowledge and reception of life as a false report giving a personal tale told in limitation, a library of specificity, a person unable to transform to another perspective, each moment containing our true portrait.
In high school I collected the discarded photographs of people when I worked at the local photo store near my house. I would create narratives about the tossed moments and lives. I believed that the greatest heros were never documented in our shared history, rather, they were common people doing great things, beyond the eye or ear of any recording device. The moments that changed the course of great power were silent, a contemplative five minutes, like a president staring into the corner of the oval office, glass-eyed, watching his thoughts. Maybe that man was not even realizing that he was making a decision, or maybe it was some small thought that changed all the others, that created the patterns, causation, that guided a person in charge later to say, 'yes drop the bomb' or 'no don't'. Maybe it was some small statement in that presidents youth made by an adult that they took as a truth, later determining a conscious thought unconsciously. Maybe it was some aunt of Edison's that altered him in a way that lead to the creation of his technology that redirected the world, listening to our voices via his recording devices, losing the gas lamp for the electric, watching the world with new eyes at night, changing the streets and their sleepy secrets into a 24 hour playground. How many forgotten events did the lamp create alone? Maybe electricity should be blamed for Hiroshima, or thanked for my mother getting to a hospital in time to live. Most causes and effects are secrets, and our limitations define our humanity, we see the darknesses edge at the end of our conscious light, illuminated in the irrationality of our electric glare.
When I saw this show at the Under the Radar Festival in January 2012 I was just starting to listen to Of Montreal. Those tunes were the folk songs inside my steps, the language and soundscapes imprinted upon NYC by my feet in tune to a strangers thoughts. I am a story unfurling and so, of course, are you, reading yourself by me, now, I am the you of a now, somewhere, somewhen. True history would be recorded by some all knowing god eye, by an intelligence great enough to perceive the extensive everything. That everything is just a thought to us, a symbol unique to each individual. And what is incredible is that we all know these things. They are thoughts put on the walls of art museums and in other forms talked about by seventeen year olds distraught about life under the width of the sky. How do you imagine the unimaginable, what does that feel like? It is the you of a now, now lost, now memory. Time lives by perception and outside of it.
El Passado es un Animal Grotesco (The Past is a Grotesque Animal)
text and direction by Mariano Pensotti, performed by Pilar Gamboa, Javier Lorenzo, Juan Minu-Jin, Maria Ines Sacerni, set and costumes by Mariana Tirantte, lighting design by Matias Sendon (and Ricardo Sica), Music by Diego Vainer (and Damian Chorovicz) Assistant direction by Leandro Orellano, Technical and production assistance by Juan Pablo Gomez, production by GRUPO MAREA, co-production by KUNSTEN FESTICAL DES ARTS brussels, COMPLEJO TEATRAL DE BUENOS AIRES, THEATERFORMEN (Hannover), NORWICH AND NORFOLK FESTIVAL, FESTIVAL DE OTONO DE MADRID. Made possible by the Performing Arts Program, National Performance Network, and the Network of Cultural Promoters of Latin America and the Caribbean, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.
Is it possible in these times to create great fictions that contain what we imagine together with real events from our lives and the lives of the people we know? How does the history of our cities influence our own personal history? What happens when fiction is set within a concrete temporal framework? How can we recount ten years in the life of a person? How do we incorporate the most recent history upon which we haven't reflected in excess- into our own more excessive stories? The play traces four characters over ten years, from 1999 to 2009. Brief, interspersed fragments tell the individual stories of four people from Buenos Aires between the ages of 25-35, the moment one stops being who one thinks one is to become the person one is, with the occasional reference to the socio-economic changes in those ten years. Some of these stories focus on everyday situations, others more on the extraordinary. Some include documentary or autobiographical elements and some others plunge openly into fiction. In turn, each story drifts and branches into smaller secondary stories. The attempt is to narrate multiple stories, in the mannor of the excessive nineteenth-century narrations, in which ambitious and exorbitant fiction is contained within a precise historical and temporal framework. The play is acted by only four actors, enclosed in a rotating round stage. They alone embark on the heroic task of narrating and performing that multiplicity of stories bringing to life dozens of characters and situations. A mega fiction which is narrated with minimam stage resources. Ten years ago, I started to collect damaged photos that a photo lab near home would throw away every month. I didn't know what for. The lab closed down a while ago- hardly anyone has their photos developed nowadays. I went back to look through the damaged images that I'd collected- blurred and discarded fragments from the lives of strangers. Many seemed to be people from my own generation: a faulty chronicle of a decade. I remembered a quote by Balzac in which he talked about his art as the attempt to "photograph the soul of people and their time." I decided to take some of the photos and try to recreate the ambitious spirit of these nineteenth-century narrations, telling the stories of four characters of my generation over ten years. I used the damaged images as the basis upon which to create them. The result was a highly narrative literary text, full of events and quite-impossible-to-represent situations, and, at the same time, with much freedom. I thought of the idea of 'the identity as a narrative construct': we are what we narrate, and also in how life becomes fiction. The Past is a Grotesque Animal is the title of a song by the band Of Montreal. I listened to it a lot while I was writing the text. Its excessive duration and ambitious narrative made me feel it close to what I was developing. I decided to use the name and include the lyrics in the play when the stories reach their end. Narrating the past is like using a voice over that could give sense to the scattered fragments of a film that is lost forever. Aided by the epic effort of four actors that tell and perform a multiple array of stories, the past arises in this play as an animal glimpsed in our dream jungle. An animal that changes shape each time we remember it. A grotesque animal.
-Mariano Pensotti
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