Monte Isla Association
Monte Isla is made up of Adrià Girona, Andrea Pellejero and Rut Girona. They all graduated from the Institut del Teatre in 2018 as performers. In 2020 they started the Monte Isla project together with Uriel Ireland and in 2021 the company won the DespertaLab grant from the Nau Ivanow with their first work entitled Allí donde no estamos.
In Monte Isla they carry out research that focuses on live arts without bodies on stage. The aim of the company is to work from the expressiveness of the technique (light, sound, machinery) and the plastic (objects, space, materials) through the fictional framework of a scenic piece. His artistic work is built from plastic experience, from contact with objects and space. In the long term, the company seeks to consolidate itself professionally by generating a platform for interdisciplinary meetings and artistic research around contemporary theatrical creation.
Donde empieza el bosque acaba el pueblo
Residency June 2022
Donde empieza el bosque acaba el pueblo is the company’s second scenic project. The show was born with the desire to materialize on a stage the tensions that the painter Edward Hopper expresses plastically in a series of canvases painted on Cape Cod that expose the relationship between civilization and nature. The members of Monte Isla see in these paintings a reliable portrait of the condition of postmodern man in his way of being and looking at the world.
The company’s intention is to inhabit, decipher, disembowel and recompose these canvases by Hopper, building a scenic piece of a landscape character where the human figure gives way to the plastic expressiveness of structures, objects and materials in a living scenography. The story is articulated from the discovery of a place, which is configured as the context and at the same time the content of the narrative of the work. The scenography ceases to be what frames the story to become its own protagonist.
The intention of the creators is not so much to tell a story but for the audience to live an experience in a scenic location and to create a visual and narrative tension between the observer and the observed through deceptive settings inspired by thrillers. In the same way, the project seeks to achieve a transposition of the audiovisual language to the mechanisms and theatrical conventions. The narrative in the work is also transferred to choreography and dance, as well as visual, abstract and conceptual components, along the lines of a universal language.
Andrea Pellejero and Adrià Girona are the creators and playwrights of Donde empieza el bosque acaba el pueblo and Pol Para is the performer. The scenography was designed by Miguel Pellejero and Xim I. Rabassa, and Adrià Girona and Uriel Ireland worked hand in hand on the sound design. The work is a co-production of the TNT Festival, the Sâlmon Festival and WorkspaceBrussels and has been carried out with the collaboration of Nau Ivanow and TeatroPuerto and with the support of Girona City Council.
