performance prospectus

mariano pensottiUn pasado es un animal grotesco

FEB 9- 12, 2012

Text & direction : Mariano PensottiPerformers : Pilar Gamboa, Javier Lorenzo, Santiago Gobernori, María Ines SancerniSet & costume design : Mariana TirantteLight design : Matías Sendón (& Ricardo Sica)Music : Diego VainerSound Engineer : Demian ChoroviczAssistant director : Leandro OrellanoTechnical and production assistant : Juan Pablo Gomez

TABLE OF CONTENTS Note from OtB....................................2Director’s Note...................................3Beginner’s Guide..............................5Bio....................................................6The Whirligig of Buenos Aires.........7Funder Credits.................................11

A NOTE FROM OTBMariano Pensotti drew inspiration from the song “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” by the pop rock freaks Of Montreal (3/24 Showbox Market) when making his play with the same name. Apparently, he listened to the song nonstop when writing the script. At almost 11 minutes, the song has heft and scale. It’s epic. It speaks of a lifetime of longing, regret and rage that probably never materializes but is deeply felt. As Mariano told the New York Times, “The image of the past as some grotesque animal that changes shape every time you think about it is so close to what happens with the past and the lived experiences when you try to remember them or retell them in the present. The past is always changing.”

It’s hard to explain what it is about the song that’s so addictive but after listening to it several times in a row, one may feel tempted to steal a car and drive to Juarez: “I’m flunking out, I’m flunking out, I’m gone, I’m just gone/But at least I author my own disaster.” The lyrics and conceit of the song are simple but penetrating; the story and the sentiment resonate. Similarly, it’s hard to explain what it is about Mariano’s play that evokes the same thoughts and emotions. Somehow he manages to make an hour and forty five minutes feel like thirty minutes as he spans ten years in the lives of four characters. Maybe it’s his roots in film that allow him to take on such breadth of material with such ease. Maybe it’s cinematic language that allows us to be drawn in so effectively. Maybe it’s the rumination on fleeting youth and distant memories that hooks the viewer. Maybe it’s the revolving stage that not only keeps the action moving but reminds us that life never stops until it does. It’s difficult to say; it just works. Mariano’s strokes are quietly bold. What’s new is his voice. His peculiar handling of material – text, staging, physicality and sound –constitute something unique. Newness doesn’t matter here.

Congratulations to Mariano and his electric cast and skilled crew on the occasion of their first tour to the United States. Almost five weeks down and only two to go!

Sarah Wilke and Lane Czaplinski

director’s noteIs 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 stories from 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, whereas 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 a multiple array of stories, in the manner 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 to narrate and perform that multiplicity of stories, bringing to life dozens of characters and situations. A mega fiction which is narrated with minimum 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

beginner’s guide to mariano pensotti1. Mariano Pensotti is based in Buenos Aires, a cultural hub of the world right now that has been fostering some incredible talents and art. One of his peers in the dance world is fellow OtB alum Diana Szeinblum. Compare their works side by side by also watching Alaska this weekend.

2. Literary arts play an important role in the creation of Mariano’s works. For El pasado, Mariano references the writing style of 19th century writers such as Georges Perec and Roberto Bolaños.

3. The impact of visual arts is apparent in El pasado, but was even more obvious in his first work to come to North America. La Marea staged individual scenes in the streets of Vancouver BC, each one unfolding through subtitles projected near the set. See images and read about the individual scenes of La Marea.

4. Pensotti is also equally influenced by film. He studied at Dramatic Arts Instituto Universitario Nacional de Artes and has honed a style of playwrighting and direction thatreflects that. Filmmakers like Fassbinder, Resnais, Godard and Herzog are amongst the ones that Pensotti claims have had an impact on him. Although you won’t be able to see it, the entire backstage looks more like a film set complete with a storyboard for each scene (all 72 of them!).

5. The music of Of Montreal also played a role in the creation of El pasado, even lending a song title to the name of the show. Pensotti told the New York Times about this:

“I really love their records and especially this song; it was so related to my intentions with this play. The image of the past as some grotesque animal that changes shape every time you think about it is so close to what happens with the past and the lived experiences when you try to remember them or retell them in the present. The past is always changing.”

BIOMariano Pensotti is an argentine author and theater director. He studied cinema, visual arts and theater in Buenos Aires, Spain and Italy. In theater as an author and director he created more than fifteen performances in the past ten years. Among his latest creations are El Pasado es un animal grotesco (The past is a grotesque animal) (2010/2012) premiered at Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires and presentd at Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Festival de Otoño (Madrid), Theaterformen (Hannover), Hebbel am ufer (Berlin), Auabirlewen (Bern), Norwich & Norfolk Festival (England), Kampnagel Festival (Hamburg), Zürcher Theater Spektakel (Zürich), Tempo Festival (Rio de Janeiro), Fiac (Bahia), Rotterdamse Schowburg (Rotterdam), Frascati Theater (Amsterdam). Sometimes I think I can see you (2010/2011) premiered in Berlin at Hebbel am Ufer as part of Ciudades Paralelas Festival and presented in Buenos Aires, Cologne, Brussels, Zürich, Warsaw, Salamanca, Copenhage, Helsinki, Girona and Paris. Encyclopaedia of unlived lives (2010) premiered at Schauspielhaus Graz (Austria) and presented during Steirischer Herbst Festival and La Marea (2005/2011) premiered at the V Buenos Aires International Festival and later on invited to the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Hebbel am Ufer Theater (Berlin), Homo Novus Festival (Riga), Dublin Festival (Ireland), Festival Automne en Normandie (Rouen), Carrefour International de Théâtre (Québec), Festival Transamériques (Montréal), Yokohama (Japan), Festival Temporada Alta (Girona), Norfolk & Norwich Festival (England), Metropolis Copenhague (Denmark) and Push Festival (Vancouver).

Mariano Pensotti has become one of the most noted experimental directors throughout the world. He has been heralded as one of Latin America’s brightest theater talents and he and his company tour extensively throughout the year. He formed the Grupo Marea together with set designer Mariana Tirantte, light designer Matías Sendón and musician Diego Vainer. In his work he developed two different lines, one composed by stage performances where he writes his own very literary texts and the play is strongly based in the work with the actors, and in parallel he produced several site specific performances where the main intention is to create a particular contrast in between fiction and reality with fiction placed in public places.

www.marianopensotti.com

The Whirligig of Buenos AiresThe Past Is a Grotesque Animal by Mariano Pensottiby Cynthia Steele, University of Washington

Mariano Pensotti’s new play is at once a snapshot of four individual twenty-somethings living in Buenos Aires over the past decade (specifically, from 1999 to 2009) and a portrait of his own generation of urban, middle-class Argentines. The action transpires when the four protagonists are between 25 and 35 years old—the time in life when one’s personal and professional futures are often decided.

The history portrayed in the play is the very recent past, the past that has just ended, or has given the illusion of ending, because every time the characters recall it, it is born again, like some fantastic animal changing shape each time it is evoked.

One Argentine critic has referred to the generation portrayed in Pensotti’s play as “the first Menem generation after Menem.” Menem was, of course, associated with liberalization, privatization, and the turn away from support of popular movements associated with Peronism. His government came to be associated, in the minds of many Argentines, with self-absorption, consumerism, materialism and superficiality. The price paid by all Argentines for the policies set in place first by the military dictatorship, and then by Menem and his successors, resulted in an unprecedented economic catastrophe in December of 2000, bankrupting the middle class and plummeting half of the Argentinean populace below the poverty line.

Pensotti has said in interviews that he sees his generation, which was about fifteen when Menem came to power, as a “defective generation.” Unlike their parents, they have had no great social projects, have explored no alternative lifestyles. At the same time they are a do-it-yourself generation, one of survivors, picking themselves up after each tumble and forging on, stubbornly hoping the next time will be different. This is played out by the four actors scrambling to play dozens of roles, in four cramped compartments on the revolving merry-go-round of Argentine history. Since no one point of view is capable of telling the whole story, the four actors pass a microphone back and forth and narrate the action for us as we observe it.

It is a generation convinced it is destined for greatness—or at least for wealth, success and glamour, for transcending the mediocrity of their parents’ lives. As evidenced by the exodus of hundreds of Argentines in the early 2000s, it is a generation persuaded that the future lies elsewhere, that happiness depends on turning into someone else. Vicky steals the life savings from her butcher father, to finance a bohemian life in Paris with her boyfriend. Like the other protagonists, though, no matter how far she travels or how hard she tries to escape, she always ends up back in Argentina, trapped by ‘the grotesque animal of the past.’ This is a generation haunted by the inevitability of failure and disappointment, even as it is launching its next self-promotion campaign.

Pensotti began his career as a filmmaker, and this formation is evident thematically—two of the four main characters are connected to film, one as an aspiring director and the other as a young woman aspiring to live the life portrayed by the Nouvelle Vague. For the most part the futures that await them are grim parodies of the lives they aspired to, with the would-be filmmaker making tawdry beer commercials, and the aspiring bohemian Parisian working at a chintzy theme park about the life of Christ.

Also, while we watch the actors portray snapshots in the lives of the characters, they also take turns providing us with their own narrative and commentary on the events, much like the voice-over narration in a film. The props are minimalist: a scarf turns into a headband, or an actor dons a pair of glasses, to signal a change in character. Pensotti has compared this play to a two-hour travelling shot. In his previous plays the director has made extensive use of video cameras and intertitles, among other filmic devices. Pensotti has also said that he imagines his plays as series of slides or art installations.

There are also many literary influences in his work. Pensotti has explained that his inspiration for writing the play included sweeping nineteenth-century novels, with their ambitious scope and myriad interlocking characters and plots. Another inspiration for the play was photography. Pensotti found a box of damaged photographs in an old photography shop in his neighborhood—at a time when digital photography had made developing film obsolete--, and he was reminded of Balzac’s aspiration to “photograph the soul of the people and their time.” Pensotti’s is a generation saturated with exposure to the media,

as we see from the ubiquitous television sets perpetually turned on to soap operas, news, etc. as a backdrop to the characters’ travails.

Marketing executive Mario finds a bizarre gift at his doorstep—a severed hand in a box—and, while he continues relentlessly climbing the corporate ladder, he sticks the hand in his freezer and obsesses about deciphering its riddle. Who were the victim and the aggressor? What were the circumstances? Who sent him the package and why? In the severed hand, one is tempted to see a metaphor for the country’s legacy of torture and disappearance, the brutal dashing of the hopes and ideals of this generation’s parents, and the lingering fear that the violence could return. This is also the first globalized generation, whose cultural references are drawn from many cultures and national histories. The play alludes to the Twin Towers and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as it does to the election of Latin America’s first indigenous President, Bolivian Evo Morales, and to the Argentine economic collapse of 2000.

Pensotti adopted his title from the key song on the break-through album Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (2007), by the U.S. indie rock group ‘Of Montreal.’ He says that he listened constantly to the song while he was writing the play, and that he felt an affinity with its ambitious scope—the song lasts eleven minutes—and with its intense, dark imagery: The sun is outIt melts the snow that fell yesterdayMakes you wonderWhy it bothered. . . .Though our love project has so much potentialBut it’s like we weren’t made for this worldThough i wouldn’t really wanna meet someone who was.

Do I have to scream in your face?I’ve been dodging lamps and vegetablesThrow it all in my faceI don’t care--Let’s just have some funLet’s tear the shit apartLet’s tear the fucking house apartLet’s tear our fucking bodies apart,Let’s just have some fun.

Pensotti has noted a punk dimension in his work. The play shares with punk art and music a belief in self-reliance and authenticity, an impulse toward anarchy, a certain anti-authoritarianism, and a mixture of high energy and fatalism. .Cheerful but morose. Sincere but ironic. Emotional catharsis as truncated therapy. Argentina as a giddy whirligig of failed plans and undying dreams.

ontheboards.org

El pasado es un animal grotesco photos by Almudena Crespo

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Production: Grupo MareaCoproduction: Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires,Theaterformen (Hannover), Norwich & Norfolk Festival, Festival de Otoño de Madrid