Monte Isla Company
Monte Isla is formed by Adrià Girona, Andrea Pellejero and Rut Girona, in addition to other collaborators who orbit around the project.
The company investigates the idea of landscape in its plays. Based on this concept, he has developed a series of practices that have to do with the choreography of the inert, that is to say, everything that participates in the staging and that is not a human body: the theatrical technique (the sound, light and machinery), the performance space, the scenography and the props. All this “matter” is conceived as the limbs of a single living organism, a “big puppet”.
This research has given rise to three pieces that make up the Trilogía del paisaje: Allí donde no estamos, premiered at the Nyam nyam space in 2021 during the Si no vols pols no vinguis a l’era cycle; Donde empieza el bosque acaba el pueblo, premiered at the TNT festival in 2022; and Escuchas del paisaje, which premiered at the La Mutant theater in 2023. These three parts do not have a narrative order, they are part of the same scenic universe, which revolves around the absence of human bodies and the spaces that have been abandoned by civilization. In these places empty of stories, Monte Isla brings into play a contemplative time, inviting us to look at a scenic landscape. The spectator’s point of view articulates these theatrical devices where the gaze is at the center of the experience. Where are we and from where do we look?
The company is established in Can Donzella, a cultural project located in the town of Sils. In 2023 they are co-founders of the festival This will not please the people, together with various cultural structures and companies in the province of Girona. This festival aims to generate a local fabric around living arts and contextual and performative practices.
Un cuerpo sin talento
Residency June 2024
Plato’s Protagoras contains the myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus, two brothers united by difference: “the one who thinks too late” and “the one who thinks before acting”. Epimetheus is tasked with distributing the particular attributes to each of the animals. He gives the shells to the turtles, the poison to the snakes, the fangs to the lions… And when he finishes the task he realizes that he has miscalculated, that he has forgotten a poor creature: the human being. A defenseless body that will receive the fire stolen from the gods.
Un cuerpo sin talento emerges from the image evoked in this myth: a precarious body that holds in its hands an alien virtue, the tool with which it faces the hostility of the world.
Until now, Monte Isla has focused on the spaces that contain us, the notion of otherness and spaces absent of human presence. A work that has been collected in three pieces, the Trilogía del paisaje: Allí donde no estamos (Nyam nyam 2021), Donde empieza el bosque acaba el pueblo (TNT 2022, Premi ex aequo in the category of Performing Arts of the III El Temps de les Arts awards) and Escuchas del paisaje (La Mutant 2023). With this new stage piece, Monte Isla reflects on how to put the body on stage. What happens when we look at this body? This body we share. This body which we use as a unit of measure for the world and which delimits the frontier of consciousness This body present under the guise of any social and cultural fiction This organic mass which appears as a ridiculous and obscene image before the sculptural charms of death
During the month of June, the company does a technical residency of the show at El Canal.
