“I have visited the MNAC, where we enjoy the beauty of the works, but not the people who work. The museum guards are always watching us.” Who makes this observation is the French creator Mohamed el Khatib, who with Valérie Mréjen takes a group of security guards from various museums to the Montjuïc museum, today and tomorrow as part of the Grec festival with a Gardien party.
“We have done this project in large museums and in small or more folkloric museums –continues the theater director–, and we have realized that the same thing happens everywhere, from the MoMA to the Clermont-Ferrand museum: the security guards? they are bored for eight hours, they constantly repeat ‘don’t touch’, and the most frequent question they are asked is ‘where is the bathroom?’. For Garden party, we have taken people from many countries and each one speaks their language”.
From here, the directors make these security guards, who come from the Louvre, Brooklyn, Stockholm…, also act in a museum, now at the MNAC, which also provides a security guard, with the “uncomfortable chairs” of their Workplace. In fact, “the public also sits in many security guard chairs, coming from a few museums around the world, and you will see how uncomfortable they are.”
“One of the questions we ask the security guards is which visitors are the worst. Some say that the French, who are arrogant, or the Russians, who enter the museum and think that everything is theirs, ”says the director, who has also asked them what his favorite work is and the one they hate the most. “A retired guard at the Nantes Museum of Fine Arts told me that he was not interested in the works during the day and that he discovered them with the flashlight, at night”.
El Khatib speaks of double tension in the show: “Double, because they don’t see the security guards or they criticize their work. There is a certain deep humiliation or contempt. On the other hand, there are guards who consider it a real pleasure and freedom not to be seen.”
The director does not usually work with professional actors: “I have worked with soccer fans, with children of separated parents… I did the first montage with a cleaning woman who when she worked seemed to do choreography and I put her with a dancer. The popular classes are not very present in the theaters”.
El Khatib also refers to the origin of his next show: “An 85-year-old person was explaining his love stories to me and I felt annoyed. Why did I feel bad? It was like thinking of parents when they make love. The secret life of the elderly will be about love and sexuality when you are over 80 years old. The testimonials have given me permission to do what I want, but they don’t want their children to know that they still make love, ”he concludes.
These two days are also presented in Barcelona, ??at the Mercat de les Flors, Alan Lucien Øyen’s show, Story, story, die. Mixing theater and dance, the Norwegian director and choreographer who has worked with the NDT and Liv Ullmann brings together freelance dancers from all over the world and confesses that he likes the mixture of the two disciplines: “There are things that are better expressed in words and others in movements, it depends on what you want to count. It is a very collaborative work, which starts from the concept of quality theatre, where fiction meets reality”.
“I have wanted to create stories about our lives and about those extremes, through social networks, where we tell about life, we reveal what we want to be perceived. And why do we do it? After all, we want to be loved, and that is very human. Love and lies are interrelated, because in the fear of losing love, lies appear”, he concludes.
Catalan version, here
