Chez L’Amour Company
Chez L’Amour is a newly formed company convened by the actress and playwright Núria Corominas Pérez (Salt, 1990) and integrated by the musician and performer Frances Ribes (Madrid, 1993) and the producer and dancer Katarina Grbic (Perpignan, 1995 ). The three members of the company share housing and work space in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat.
Un xai ha creuat el desert is their first joint creation.
Un xai ha creuat el desert
Residency April 2024
Un xai ha creuat el desert (tentative title) is a show of creation that poeticizes, analyzes and stages one of the great ailments of our time: the pathology of depression. The piece proposes a scenic device that inverts the function of conventional theater spaces: the performers inhabit the audience while the spectators observe from the stage.
This piece of hybrid languages plays with sound experimentation, visual experience and the spoken word in order to consolidate its own scenic imagination. This imagery is based on a contemporary reinterpretation of the figure of the jester. What happens when the buffoon, the satyr, the “professional lunatic” is depressed? How is the jester’s freedom of speech when it is captured, paralyzed by depression? What kind of sound does a buffoon make with melancholy? Who is the depressed buffoon talking from the patio? Who is he talking to? And why?
Placing the audience on stage is an aesthetic statement but also an ethical one. By placing the audience on the stage, facing the audience, a doubling occurs typical of melancholic staging. A melancholic is someone who observes himself living without living. In the same way as the melancholic, the spectator sees himself living without living through the speculum of the theater, with the proposal of the company, however, what the spectator will see is a delirious “self” and delirious with melancholic panic, a “self” that wanders in the loss of meaning, not without losing its humor.
This piece, finally, wants to investigate with the possibility of purging or catharsis, perhaps the jester will find, from the game of theatrical performances, a way to escape his condition, and it is here that the audience will be able to purge the discomfort that runs through us collectively.
