‘Nodi: of dogs and damned’
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Idea original: La Moukhles
Dramaturgy and direction: Maria Donoso, Albert Boronat
Performers: Fermí Herrero, Miriam Moukhles, Joan Sentís
Place and date: El Maldà (May 10, 2024)
A small white cylinder and a smoke machine. There are no herbal cigarettes. One of the many details that make Nodi: de gossos i damndos a show of extreme care and thought in its apparent simplicity. A smoking cigar is presented bluntly as an exercise in fiction. Fog of the past. The trace of something very far away and lost. The distance, for example, between grandchildren and grandparents; between direct experience and the conflict between romanticized invocation – one step away from becoming Midnight in Barcelona – and critical reflection.
It is smoked because among the artificial volutes dance the written words of Pau Malvido, the confessed ones of Marisa Muñiz and the archived and sung words of Pau Riba. Perished and survived characters from the Barcelona of the counterculture. Anarcho-libertarian fireflies that shone in the interlude between the death rattles of Francoism and the first municipal elections of an uncertain democracy. A decade without control over culture in a Barcelona that had grown tired of the bubble of the gauche divine and had not yet discovered punk and design. The uncommodified city of the damned.
We go back half a century because that is what Joan Feels wants due to two exceptional encounters in his life: as a teenager, in his high school, when he played before a man as idolized as he was hieratic, Pau Riba, and not long ago, when he completed the profession of actor with telephone assistance for administration and is found in a so-called rampant biography of Marisa Muñiz and her dog Nodi.
Joan, the accidental link between the wayward children of the enlightened Catalan bourgeoisie and the offspring of the proletarian class that rebels against its fate. The extremes that will share the dirty alleys of the old neighborhoods, the music joints and the drug tolls.
Joan acts as a stupefied medium of self-fulfilling prophecies – which burst into the Maldà living room like the sonorous furies of institutional Catalan pop-rock –, supported by the fine dramaturgy of Maria Donoso and Albert Boronat – who also direct the show – and the company. in a scene by Miriam Moukhles and Fermí Herrero. She moves firmly and hypnotically between the shy voice of Pau Maragall (Malvido) and the hoarse voice of Marisa Muñiz; He transmuted into Pau Riba even the smallest gesture of his flaming fingers.
And between autofiction, remembrance of an impossible fleeting moment and awareness of disenchantment, a performance is developed that dramatizes with great sensitivity the austerity of means, converting material lack into a choreography of immediacy and urgency, and documentary theater into a surprising coven. of the intimacy between Star magazine covers and vinyl records. A spectacle of serene intensity that absorbs the viewer in its subtle dis(charm).
