La luz de Croisset (Croisset's light) (1991)
Unpublished and unpremiered play.
Gustave Flaubert writes in his house in Croisset. His candlelight serves as a lighthouse for approaching ships. Literature as a tool, as an instrument of salvation. Gustave Flaubert reviews his days, unfolds silenced secrets, fucks like a bear and openly declares his foot fetish.
My first play - yes: deformed and exaggerated.
Sade (1993)
Unpublished play.
Premiered in August 2011 under the stage direction of Ernesto Donegana in the venue El Extranjero, Buenos Aires.
Years ago I learned to become obsessed with the Divine Marquis. The intersection between science and desire woke up in me a strong fascination. And I use this precise word “fascination” in order to underline its magical connotation: this man and his writing mesmerized me. The Marquis de Sade was read in those years (ruled by the dictatorship) on editions that were achieved in a hidden way: you can find them at the back rooms of those bookstores on Corrientes Avenue mixed between porn magazines: in translations of dubious origin, in covers with porn engravings and very small, tiny letters... And it was because of its prohibition that was called to be discovered and as far as I discovered him, it was transformed immediately into an obsession. Sade knew how to construct texts that can mix the most precise architecture with the wildest of the desires. Something in that writing was infectious, pure poison. Since then I do nothing more than intending to write texts as those. Sade created me as a writer.
Alejandro Tantanian
Sumario de la muerte de Kleist (Summary of Kleist's death) (1993)
Published play.
Premiered in April 1998 under the stage direction of Alejandro Ullúa in the venue Cunill Cabanellas, Teatro San Martín, Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires (CTBA)
Heinrich von Kleist
(1777- 1811)
Between these two random numbers is contained the succession of days, hours and seconds of a wild beast. Kleist planned as a soldier the assassination of Napoleon and, as a poet the dethronement of Goethe. He could not stay anywhere. His characters are an extension of escape, of flee, of marginality.
His works and his life were doomed to failure.
Heinrich von Kleist did not rest until he found his companion for death and terrorize an entire society with those bloodstains drawn on his body and Henriette Vogel's.
One of his obsessions was to unite his life to his work: to blow up the words on the street, to let life burst between the letters. That Todesplan (death plan) sketched in the company of Henriette Vogel is the triumph of this obsession: he wrote a tragic farewell scene for two characters being Henriette and himself the chosen actors for the play to be played.
Alejandro Tantanian
El peso del silencio (The weight of silence)(1994)
Published play.
Premiered in September 1997 in the frame of the cycle Género Chico at Teatro del Pueblo, Buenos Aires.
Short play without text: a kind of silent prologue for what it will be Un cuento alemán (A German short story).
La Tercera Parte del Mar (The Third Part of the Sea) (1995)
Published play.
Premiered in April 1999 under the stage direction of Roberto Villanueva in the venue Babilonia, Buenos Aires.
Voices in war (On storms and words)
The word seems to have been the beginning of everything.
Creation vortex, the first storm.
Victoria, one of the voices of this play, tries to give back to the word some of that primary stage. Through magic and sorcery, through art and murder, Victoria intends to approach the first mystery of creation.
Rodrigo's voice emerges from the shadows, a foreign voice intended to speak with Victoria’s, and he seems to be searching the same mystery.
Something, however, divides their wills: Victoria's plan seems to have been inspired by the divine, Rodrigo by the human.
And there, on that edge, in that abyss, the play unfolds.
Victoria's voice “wars” Rodrigo’s: and it’s this battle that unleashes the inexorable tragedy.
The bodies are the battlefield.
Nothing seems to happen.
However hidden beneath the surface of action lies the unmistakable tempest of the word: the first and final weapon of theatre.
Alejandro Tantanian
Juegos de Damas Crueles (Cruel ladies games) (1995)
Published play.
Premiered in May 1997 under the stage direction of Mariana Percovich in Montevideo (Uruguay).
Juegos de damas cruelesis a mixed text.
A search through myth in contemporaneity.
Taking the furies to propel the plot and brewing a strange marriage with the biblical myth of Isaac's sacrifice the play attempts to give answers to certain issues that work obsessively on my writing: identity, the name of the father, hidden crimes.
The language used in the piece aims to combine two types of speech allegedly opposed: the pornographic language and poetic language.
Alejandro Tantanian
Ensayo sobre el barroco (Essay on the baroque) (1996)
Unpublished play.
Premiered in May 2003 under the stage direction of Lautaro Brunatti and Milagros Ferreyra, Buenos Aires.
She grew up and arrived to this crossroad and she does not know why she has lost the girl and which road she has to take the one from there is straight and the sky is blue and it seems to lose itself in a curve and over the ground rises a black sky maybe the red moon waits at the other side of the curve and on the right path maybe she will find the point of no return.
Un cuento alemán (A German short story) (1997)
Published play.
Premiered during the Season of 1997 under the stage direction of the author in coproduction with Teatro San Martín at the venue Espacio Callejón, Buenos Aires.
Friedrich Hölderlin receives a letter. In it a death is told. His beloved. He abandons everything in search of that body. He opens the door. And walks. For six months. That walk sinks him into the night, the dream and madness. He arrives late. The beloved body lies underground. Hölderlin is locked in a tower. Hölderlin's exile is a genuine process of poetic insemination of the things that for the simple fact of being have an unquenchable beauty; his desired exile from the world is purely semantic, voracious, and also the safest and strong lyrical trace ever left by an artist.
Alejandro Tantanian
Barroco (Baroque) (1997)
Unpublished and unpremiered play.
Author
Maybe I can tell the story now.
A wall divides the scene.
A perpendicular space.
Arnalta
You can sleep
on my lap
you can rest your head
on my lap.
Sleep
beloved lady
sleep.
This skirt of mine will be your cradle
Will be your pillow this skirt of mine
Ensayo sobre la peste (Essay on the pest) (1997)
Published play.
Premiered in June 1998 at the Festival de Nîmes (France).
Public reading in May, 2002 in the frame of the cycle Bocas Locas, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, Belgium.
There is an eternal principle, tacit or appointed, and periodically that eternal principle – named God, the impersonal absolute or the initial couple - creates the world. But after a given period it is reabsorbed. The curtain falls on the great drama of creation and, after an interval that can last billions of years, slowly rises again. At the empty stage the characters reappear. The represented play differs according the system used for its depiction, but within each system, in the perspective of a given text, the representation is repeated, ever identical.
Un grito oscuro (A dark cry) (1998)
Published play.
Premiered in August 1998 under the stage direction of Michel Didym, Walter Manfré and Veronique Bellegarde in the frame of Festival Mousson d'Eté (France), for the show Paroles d'acteurs: La Confession.
The one that whispers need not be defined as male or female. Any gender allows incarnation. The one that listens can also a be a man or a woman. After all there are no distinctive features for those who cry in the dark.
The one that whispers will come slowly into the one that listens and will tell, violently, the following.
Comedia. Un maestro de Alemania (Comedy. A master from Germany) (1998)
Published play, not premiered.
Comedia. Un maestro de Alemania takes over the figure of Paul Celan (1920-1970) to dive into the obscurity of his poetry in order to draw a path to horror.
Celan, witness and victim of the Holocaust, from the fog and the night raised his word by using the language of the murderers as an instrument.
Celan wrote in German to exorcise the demons of Germany.
This play traces a path from the memory of extermination, stops at a present suspended and falls into the abyssal depths where oblivion "rests".
So is Celan's path: a life shattered by the horror (his parents were killed in an extermination camp) and a voluntary death (thrown into the Seine from the Pont Mirabeau to the waters of April.)
A journey from darkness to darkness.
Alejandro Tantanian
El pez detrás de los espejos (The fish behind the mirrors) (1999)
Unpublished play.
Premiered in December 1999 and written for a commission for Casa de América, Madrid, Spain.
From The Book of the Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges this play questions the boundaries between reality and fiction. Outrageous monologue in front of a dumb mirror.
Una anatomía de la sombra (An anatomy of the shadow) (2000)
Published play, not premiered.
The play opens where the myth of Orpheus stops. Eurydice is the voice of this monologue. She is lost again, wandering, ghostly in front of Orpheus that can no longer see her. And she is forced to witness the death of her beloved.
sambô (2000)
Unpublished play.
Premiered in June 2000 under the stage direction of Jörg Laue in the frame of a Festival organised for the 10th Anniversary of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany.
Based on a series of questions sambô constructs a repertoire of voices willing to create an impossible space.
La desilusión (The disillusion) (2000)
Unpublished play.
Inspired in the Museo de Armas de la Nación (National Museum of Weapons)
Written in collaborations with Luis Cano.
Premiered in December 2000 under the stage direction of both authors at the cycle Museos V organised by the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, Universidad de Buenos Aires.
The room 13b is missing since ages. Approximately one hundred and twenty years separate us from the memory. A short time perhaps in history, but long for this catalogue I am doing…
Jump back: Lieutenant Colonel Ignacio Fotheringham. Year 1879. Daguerreotype of a painting on canvas, reproducing a stop in which his officers surround General Roca. This is Fotheringham, the one near him.
THIS LIEUTENANT OF YOU, GENTLEMEN, CANNOT BE FURTHER FROM NOSTALGIA THAN FROM ME.
All of us are hanging on a wall, no doubt.
La Escala Humana (2000)
Published play.
Written in collaboration with Javier Daulte and Rafael Spregelburd.
Premiered in May 2001 under the stage direction of the authors in the venue Espacio Callejón, Buenos Aires in coproduction with Hebbel-Theater Berlin and Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires (CTBA).
A casual crime that leads to another, then perhaps to many more. Repetition is, especially if it is on killing a serious matter, but is the only more or less known human way of putting things in order. And can calm us down.
A plan, extremely casual too, for not having to pay for the committed crimes.
A plan that, except for some details on a smaller scale, will work perfectly.
The danger is looming over everybody. And the danger is that unimportant things are never shown as unimportant things.
Quite the contrary, the unimportant things take all the time the place of the very important things, and one has to be very awake in order to distinguish one from the other.
This is the story of a family that received by chance a strange lucidity.
Cine Quirúrgico (Surgical cinema) (2001)
Published play.
Premiered in November 2001 under the stage direction of Edgardo Rudnitzky at the venue El Portón de Sánchez, Buenos Aires in coproduction with Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires (CTBA).
Cine Quirúrgico starts from two small films and the history of the man who made them: Dr. Alejandro Posadas. A man whose real life is almost a fiction. These two short movies showed surgical operations and they were the first movies ever done in Argentina (around 1899 and 1900).
Cine Quirúrgico is an apocryphal documentary about the life of Posadas, his films, writings and stories of some of his successors mixed with pettiness and fervour that we could describe, at one point, as classic and strong profiles of our identity.
Jack (2001)
Unpublished and unpremiered play.
Written in collaboration with Luis Cano.
An intent of reconstruction a personal diary: Jack the Ripper’s.
The play uses all the possible ways to “write a life”.
It's May, it must be Brussels: 1. Unpacking / 2. Misguided Tour / 3. Quarrels / 4. Packing (2002)
Unpublished plays.
Premiered in May 2002 under the stage direction of Alejandro Tantanian, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, Belgium.
A series of four performatic events based on the city of Brussels and the Kunstenfestivaldesarts.
Temperley (2002)
Published play.
Premiered in July 2002 under the stage direction of Luciano Suardi in the frame of the cycle Biodrama at Teatro Sarmiento, Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires (CTBA).
The cycle Biodrama cycle, based on bringing the life of one alive Argentinean people to the stage has its second milestone with Temperley based in Amparo's life, an anonymous suburban dweller who came from her native Galicia looking for a place to live. Temperley, at last, was that place.
(…)
Suardi borrowed this story and along with Alejandro Tantanian drew an intricate network of feelings, not without humour and tenderness that blows between the comments and anecdotes. Amparo could be our mother, our sister or even we.
Alejandro Cruz, La Nación, August 11th, 2002.
El Orfeo (The Orpheus) (2001/2002)
Published play, not premiered.
The stones do not talk with the wind.
The stones
speak the language of the sea.
I know it,
because time
taught me.
The stones are there:
Waiting
in silence
the wet embrace
of the salt.
The night devours the landscape.
So.
Yet
the stones remain
throwing to the water
the shapes of its geography.
And I am still here.
Carlos W. Sáenz (1956 - ) (2003)
Published play.
Show conceived in collaboration with Edgardo Rudnitzky and Jorge Macchi. Premiered in May 2003 under the stage direction of Alejandro Tantanian at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, Belgium in coproduction with Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt; Hebbel–Theater, Berlin and Akademie Schloss Solitude.
"except the meetings that determine the course of history
I dedicate myself to describe certainty
in mirrored letters
I think the silence is here
and the gun lies
on the book
where it should be
I am not guilty of what I am blame for
I am not the murderer of the bodies that appear
I am not the one that determines the course of history
I am the history
I am not the author of the words you could find on the walls
the obscene graffiti on the urinal
I am not the one listening to this song
I do not hoist the flag
I am not the one who hoisted the flag
I am not the one that sings Aurora
I am Aurora
I'm not the man you are searching
I am the search "
carlos w. sáenz (1956 - )
Excursión (2003)
Unpublished play.
Written in collaboration with Luis Cano.
Premiered in November 2003 under the stage direction of the authors in the venue ElKafka, Buenos Aires.
An old woman lives surrounded by wolves dressed with slippers and grandmother's blankets. She's no longer using her old red hood.
The light of a match still keeps intact the death of the girl. Whenever a match is lit, the little one lives in the memory of light, and think in Christmas delicacies never tried before, in a warm place and in her grandmother that tear off of the earth. She is the little Mach Girl.
(...)
On August 22nd at 3.30 am the 19 prisoners from the base Almirante Zar were shot by a patrol in charge of Lieutenant Commander Luis Emilio Sosa and Lieutenant Roberto Bravo.
In the sewer is still shouting the little tin soldier still eaten by the rat water.
(...)
Peron described the deaths as "murders." Public opinion disbelieved the official version. On August 25th the CGT declared a 14-hour strike. Lanusse sent emissaries to Chile in order to ask extradition of fugitive guerrillas. He tried to judge them as common criminals. Public funerals of the guerrillas executed were banned.
Muñequita o juremos con gloria morir (Muñequita or let's swear to die with glory) (2003)
Published play.
Premiered in November 2003 under the stage direction of Matthias Langhoff at the TNT (Thêatre National de Toulouse – France).
Premiered in May 2004 at the theatre of Nanterre – Amandiers, Paris.
This play is written in response to a concern: that one that awakens on me confronting Argentina's obsession with the dead. Every society attempts a dialogue with their dead. It is through this mediumistic operation that we can revisit the past. The angel of history walks through the territory of the present, gives his back to the past, his body moves forward and his eyes are staring on what had happened. The angel's walking is ethereal: he does not settles on things, he overflows them. But here in Argentina the angel seems to have wiped out history and the bodies that leaves behind are the witnesses of violence since the origin of this nation. It is this complex and violent relationship that Argentina has with his dead bodies (or the absence of bodies) that awakened on me this concern now translated into some images and some words: this play.
Alejandro Tantanian
Los Mansos (The Meek ones) (2005)
Published plays.
Based on motifs of the novel The idiot by Fedor Dostoevsky.
Premiered in August 2005 under the stage direction of Alejandro Tantanian in Buenos Aires.
Los Mansos is a text that gives account to certain narrative procedures present in the work of Fedor Dostoevsky's: polyphony, the double, the autobiography as a quarry for the production of fiction.
When someone on stage says "I" is naming himself (or herself), thus constitutes a subject and a speech takes shape.
But what is this "I"?
Dostoevsky worked on the construction of various "selves": his concern was "the other" in his novels he embodied ideas in bodies: all those bodies were also an "I".
One of the engines of Los Mansos is to penetrate this concept in order to understand what are the limits of the "self" in theatre. What are we saying when we say “I”? What builds up that “I” when it is pronounced on stage? Which are the limits of that “I”?
Tyse (2007)
Unpublished and unpremiered play.
They are two. And they resemble each other.
But they have walked different paths, different spaces, different heights, and different times: other geographies.
But chance - or representation (which is another form of chance) - is united here today
They argue because of a woman. They talk about literature. They think they know what the other doesn't know. They complement each other - maybe beyond the limits.
A weapon is hidden within the clothes.
And it's well known that a weapon on the scene tends to fire.
We do not know who has the weapon. We do not know - then - who will shoot and who will fall under the weight of the blood.
Everybody (2007)
Unpublished and unpremiered play.
Sadness is the evil invention of the happy ones. And we, who are at the other side of sorrow, want to get rid of sadness. But we know that this is not well regarded by those who wield the power of happiness. And that's why they want to get rid of us. That's why they want to fire us away from what this extraordinary house means to us: the place to deposit the entire sadness and live in full happiness. The space for the wonder of light and eternal happiness. There, between the walls cemented by the moods of sadness, will be imprisoned forever the tears of misery, this house has been created for that: to drain your sadness once and forever. The sorrow has to know the destination it deserves: encapsulation, exile and despair. But it's late and I did not say what is necessary. And I did nothing.
Y nada más (And nothing more) (2007)
Unpublished play.
On the life and works by Marina Tsvetaeva.
Premiered in May 2007 under the stage direction of Alejandro Tantanian in the venue Espacio Callejón, Buenos Aires.
Letter from Marina Tsvetaeva to Rainer Maria Rilke
August 2nd, 1926
I will never get used to you (like I will never get used to myself) or to the strangeness, or my own feelings about you. You are the one I will dream tonight, I will appear in your dreams tonight. (Watch a dream or being dreamed?). As an alien in a strange dream. I never wait, I always wake you up. If someone someday we dreamed us together, then we would meet.
Rainer, I want to be with you, I want this for this new "I" that can only be done with you, in you. And also, Rainer, do not get angry, I am always me, I want to sleep on your side, doze and sleep. (...) Simply sleep. Nothing more. No, something else: bury my head in your left shoulder, my hand in your right and nothing else. No, something else: to know namely, even in my deepest dream, that you stand beside me. And something else: hear the sound of your heart. And ... kiss it.
(...)
Rainer, night is falling, I love you.
(...)
Rainer, do not get angry with me, or get angry if you want, but tonight I will sleep at your side. Close the outbreak of starred darkness, the window.
(...)
My eyes are wide open, and in the external world there is more darkness than within me. The bed is a boat and we started our trip.
(...)
You cannot answer me if you don't want - kiss me once again.
M.
La libertad (Freedom) (2007)
Unpublished play.
Written in collaboration with Martín Tufró and Ariel Farace.
Premiered in June 2007 under the stage direction of Alejandro Tantanian in the frame of Festival Schillertage, Mannheim, Germany
Friedrich Schiller arrives to us “invited” by the Schillertage. Something we knew about him: mainly by the obvious associations with Beethoven, the birth of German Idealism and Goethe. The impact came later: when we come to understand that here, in Buenos Aires, today, his way to see the world was amazingly near to us.
It was then when we thought about giving form to that revelation, in let Schiller's influence - apparently distant- take shape today in us.
Thus Pablo Soler arises: an Argentinean born the exact day of Schiller's death, 147 years later. Pablo Soler is, then, the way to know Schiller’s influence in our city.
La libertad is the ultimate and main goal we find in the lives of both Pablo Soler and Friedrich Schiller; is the bound -a material and spiritual one- that ties them up.
The best way to present all this material, to give account of this impact, would be, we believe, by means of a conference: since in it all the obsessions of Schiller can come together, obsessions that were –later- those of Pablo Soler.
Alejandro Tantanian
Los Sensuales (2008)
Published play.
Premiered in May 2008 under the stage direction of Alejandro Tantanian in Buenos Aires.
Teodoro Tigrov was beaten to death with a hammer.
His troubled lover, Odette Malheur, witnessed the murder. But the night was able to hide the faces of those who picked up the hammer.
Odette will then decide to implement the plan to disclose the identity of the murderer: the first step is to call his brothers Alberto and Lise Malheur – they didn't see each other for twenty years, since she joined her life to that of Teodoro – in order to help her with the investigation.
The suspects are five: Mijail and Sonja Tigrov (dark and brooding twin-children of Teodoro Tigrov and Odille Malheur (twin of Odette, who died twenty years ago) and Alex, Damien and William Richardson, sons of the same Teodoro and a one so named Margaret Richardson (that Teodoro won in a poker table.)
The five suspects are, of course, sons of the same father.
But they do not know it.
Or they pretend they do not know it.
Odette wove the cobwebs and summons the forces of evil for poisoning the air with lust.
The following is a myriad of passionate stories, exalted melodies, and bodies thrown to the most uncontrolled passion. This unstoppable flood of emotions leads to a disproportionate and unique finale that will find its limits just when the curtain falls.
Amerika (2009)
Unpublished play.
Version of the homonymous novel by Franz Kafka.
Premiered in April 2009 under the stage direction of Alejandro Tantanian at the Nationaltheater Mannheim, Germany with the ensemble of the theatre.
Amerika takes Franz Kafka's novel as a starting point: it will not be an adaptation of the novel; it will not be a twice-told tale. Karl Rossmann – the leading character of Kafka's work – is a young man growing up: this journey (this Bildungsroman) has the shape of a slapstick comedy and a melancholic story: is the story of a farewell to homeland, childhood and innocence.
Those are the issues that I prefer above all and Amerika (our performance) will be focused on that.
Karl Rossmann has to forget his language, his past, his roots, and his story: he is trapped and mesmerized by the energy and power of America but this mirage is full of sadness: everything will be missed and the self will be dissolved in the anonymity.
Pop music, frenetic dances, sad songs, great movies, homeland tunes, massive buildings, long journeys, strange persons, beautiful ladies: everything will be on Karl's trip in America.
On the other side of the world – in Europe - his parents will be wandering where Karl should be: he disappeared: he has just vanished from his world.
A tragedy in Europe is a comedy in America.
Alejandro Tantanian
Marina (2009)
Unpublished and unpremiered play.
Marina shines - happy: over the meaning of words, over the pulse of her pain, over the certainty of each silence. (…) In music and solitude she is, in the bliss and the word she shall be: Marina, then - a hurricane: the lightning-woman. The light above the door. Perfect. Luminous as her grief. Huge as a howling train. Those who come will receive her and the party should be big like her. Happiness will have white flowers - and water and bodies delivered to the only passion of telling, dancing, shouting, showing the loneliness and her ways: Marina Tsvetaeva.
Nie war der Schatten (Never Was A Shade) (2012)
Unpublished play.
Premiered in March 2012 under the stage direction of Alejandro Tantanian at the Nationaltheater Mannheim, Germany with the ensemble of the theatre.
The show begins as a scientific lecture on the theme of light and shadow, possibly touching on natural science, psychology, cultural history as well as the esoteric. Apparently the man is obsessed with the topic. He is not a scientist by profession but rather by inclination and fascination with his object. Possibly he is a charlatan. As the lecture proceeds the neutral and scientific tone gives way to a more emotional and subjective rhetoric. It eventually becomes apparent that the man himself does not cast a shadow and that he tries to cope with being shadowless.
Towards the middle of the show the lecture is interrupted. The actor that plays the man is replaced by another actor, without there being a comment or explanation offered to the audience. A new actor now plays the part and at first it seems as if nothing else had changed. Only towards the end of the show it becomes apparent that two men are present on the scene and that one might be the shadow of the other.
Alejandro Tantanian
La hora azul. Un cabaret (The Blue Hour. A Cabaret) (2013)
Unpublished play.
Premiered in Buenos Aires on May 31st under Ernesto Donegana's stage direction.
La hora azul. Un cabaret has no intention of being a mirror of the country.
It is not a kind of crude metaphor for the excesses and its consequences.
It is not the requiem of an era.
It doesn't want to be praise for past times.
And it doesn't talk about what happens to us and happens again, yes, as if we were bound to repeat the same story over and over and over again.
It doesn't even care that everything is about to happen (which is a way of saying that nothing happens).
This cabaret is nothing of all that.
Welcome all - no one knows where we are.
Alejandro Tantanian
Bencich (2014)
Unpublished play.
Premiered in Buenos Aires on March 27th, 2014 in the event Espacios revelados organized by Buenos Aires Ciudad and Siemens Stiftung.
Bencich tries a route around the edges of fiction, a journey to the heights of the city where the myth mixes with reality.
Discover the tumultuous life of the great Eduardo Le Monnier, French architect who lived in our city and designed extraordinary buildings, including the Bencich - discover the truth hidden behind the walls ---
"My destiny is the Ocean," says Edouard Le Monnier. He was just a kid when that phrase came from his mouth. However, as the irrevocable night, fate was once the Ocean and Le Monnier offered himself.”
Alejandro Tantanian
Work produced after the Workshop given from October 22nd to November 23rd, 2014 at the MAMBA (Buenos Aires’s Museum of Modern Art) – inside the installation Habitat Sequences by Gabriel Lester.
REQUEST TEXT
Archipelago (2017)
Unpublished work
Project of the company Artistas inflamables - resulting from the scenic research and experimentation carried out among people from various countries and areas during an artistic residence, at the facilities of the National Dance Company, the Losdedae Company and the Carmen Amaya Dance Conservatory; Paco Rabal Cultural Center, Madrid, Spain, January 2017.
From the time of Homer everything is trip (The Odyssey) or everything is war (The Iliad) - nothing seems to be able to escape this strict rule. Since then we have contemplated life as a journey or as a war. Alternately or merged the way of our existence is built on these two models.
Archipelago is a new journey built on the footsteps of the one who created Franz Schubert on the poems of Wilhelm Müller: Winterreise.
Here - as there - a walker leaves his house and starts walking. The forest gives shelter and wonderful beings are presented with the will to advise the ideal way or to prevent the dangers that lurk, of course, in the dark. The walker would like to leave behind a love. That's why he walks. His conscience, split, warns him to keep going, that there, at the front, that unrequited love will stop tearing him apart. And the traveler advances towards the night, the darkness and also toward hope.
We invite you, then, joyful to this extraordinary trip.
Alejandro Tantanian
A serie of monologues by Alejandro Tantanian from William Shakespeare’s play written for the show 3 8 S M conceived and directed by Laurent Berger, Teatro Cervantes – Teatro Nacional Argentino, María Guerrero, October 2017.
SOLICITAR TEXTO
Play commissioned by the Artistic Direction of ERT (Emilia Romagna Teatro) premiered under the stage direction of Claudio Longhi and translated by Davide Carnevali, Teatro Storchi, Modena, Italy, September 2020.
Yes, I was the glow floating on the snow and I was the song in the summer leaves, but this was only the first trick I took from the long series of my mythical history, because I also knew obedience: carrying branches to the nest, food to the pigeons, kisses to my wife.
But don't stop, stay with me: listen.
If I was the song that pierced your heart, then I was the music of your heart, the one you wanted and needed, and so the wild flourished, with all its disciples: gardeners, lovers, people who mourn the death of rivers.
And this was my true mission: to be the music of the body. It is understood? Because truly the body needs a song, a spirit, a soul. And in turn, to do its work the soul needs a body, and I am both the earth and the inexplicable beauty of the sky where I fly, so softly, so welcome, yes, and this is why I was sent, to teach this to your heart.