Of friendship ?????
Authorship and direction: Col·lectiu Las Huecas
Performers: Júlia Barbany, Esmeralda Colette, Núria Corominas, Núria Dalmau, Agnès Jabbour, Blanca Javaloy, Andrea Pellejero, Laura Roig
Place and date: Beckett Room (I/27/2024)
“We ran out of love from using it so much.” Although Las Huecas prefer the Germanic Nietzsche and his aphorisms to provide a philosophical framework for their new project, it is Manuel Alejandro’s lyrics that dominate the rapturous spirit of De l’amistat. Songwriter and philosopher who may not be so far away. They both cared a lot about the experience that goes through the body.
The bodies that Júlia Barbany, Esmeralda Colette, Núria Corominas and Andrea Pellejero have put on with radical honesty since they began their journey as a collective in 2016. And when they are not enough to fill the stage with the richness of their message, they invite other bodies. Expert companions who complete the speech – as happened in Those Who Must Die – or who literally multiply into disconcerting doppelgänger.
Those other bodies that are made available to them as avatars on which to pour the existential and artistic dilemma of a friendship that seems not to have emerged unscathed from the intensity of the rehearsal room’s resonance chamber of egos and emotions. Those others (Núria Dalmau, Agnès Jabbour, Blanca Javaloy and Laura Roig) who, like post-dramatic golems, allow themselves to be molded in a delirious spiral of instructions on how to act to be Júlia, Esmeralda, Núria and Andrea.
A metatheatrical situation that is increasingly hilarious, more uncontrolled, more sincere. A personal battle to mark territory, style and presence that fuels the chaos of their other selves, until the mirror-creatures are freed from their creators in a brutal Pirandellian twist. A very Artaud theatrical game – with laughter as a dramatic guerrilla weapon – that is reminiscent in some aspects of the way that Nao Albet and Marcel Borràs understand the living arts. A couple that a few months ago also delighted us with a fiction about their personal and artistic breakup.
Las Huecas perhaps work with a lesser degree of manipulation of the fictional pact with the public. In his shows there is always a moment to transcend catharsis and enter pure abstraction. Also in De l’amistat we move from the caricature of gestalt theater to the Dionysian ritual, with the crude multiplication of its alter egos – the self as a simple disguise – to represent a distillation of their respective entities.
And when the audience is already immersed in a dreamlike psychoanalytic choreography, the stage of the Beckett’s upper room is transformed into a concert, with the soloist dressed in a trash version of the hair surrealism of Schiaparelli and Dalí. One more demonstration of the inexhaustible talent that Las Huecas give in their indescribable yet stimulating shows. I hope this has served to heal wounds. The group deserves to grow in the future.
