Week after week, the Greek Festival presents proposals that will soon fill Barcelona with all kinds of artistic disciplines. Yesterday was the turn of five shows of creation and co-productions, among which Una illa stands out, the new work of Agrupación Señor Serrano, made from dialogue for two years with artificial intelligence (AI).
“We’ve already worked with the AI ??in Extinction, and now we’re going back to it, but I want to say that it doesn’t have any intelligence,” says Àlex Serrano. “An island is about how we should understand each other as humans, and here we do it with AI. In life, we dialogue and try to agree with each other. But this is very difficult. We asked the AI ??what we should do on the stage”.
The AI ??suggested that they work with a castaway who is inside a bubble or on an island. “He arrives at an archipelago – continues Serrano – and goes on living on each of the islands and has to get along with the people who live there, but he doesn’t succeed and he jumps from island to island”. Carlota Grau adds: “There is a change of scale compared to Extinction two years ago. Here we play more with metaphors”.
“Yes, there is a camera, but it is robotic – points out Serrano -. The conversation with the AI ??has lasted two years and has been edited. These are very frustrating dialogues and we had to do a lot of work. We discarded many of the options it gave us. Like it or not, we had to come to an agreement”. And he concludes: “The AI ??database has a lot of Broadway, like Cats or Cantando bajo la lluvia. You give AI garbage and it gets garbage back. The work has consisted of agreeing with someone who has no idea and is tacky.” (Teatre Lliure de Montjuïc, 7-9/VII)
Marcos Morau spoke about La Veronal’s new show, Firmamento: “I wanted to do something for young people, for the viewers of the future. I have tried to preserve my language but taking it elsewhere, not adopting their language. In the work we are in a cinema and, from this, we see how our body reacts to the stimuli that an artistic expression gives you. Firmamento tries to say that there are no limits to create, react, interrelate… I have chosen to go back to 15-year-old Marcos in a religious school”, he continues. (Flower Market, 13-15/VII)
María Muñoz and Pep Ramis, from Mal Pelo, return to the origins with Double infinite. The bluebird call. “After four years with Bach – declares Muñoz -, we wanted to do a very different show, that would return to the world that appears when we are both alone, of how they put us back in front of the essential things in life. It is made by intuition, heart and imagination. We have made the effort to combine the language of the body with that of the text and the image”.
Ramis adds: “We both like to ask each other questions about language. what is different Well, we are 60 and 61 years old and they are different bodies”. Mal Pelo will go to Avignon this summer with a previous show, Inventions. (TNC, 1-9/VII)
Juana Dolores presents the second part of her trilogy, *Hit me if I’m pretty* or the modern princess. “The piece is a feminist rally, which dialogues with Machiavelli’s The Prince and Gramsci’s The Modern Prince. My goal was to make a feminist work that did not ignore male violence.” (Old Theatre, 6/VII-6/VIII)
The fifth show that was presented yesterday is Fem una bona pena before dying, by Sònia Gómez and Los Sara Fontán. “It is a reflection on death. The stage space is a study on black, in collaboration with Joan Morey”, says Gómez. And Edi Pou adds: “We looked for great deaths on stage and made a catalogue”. And they reveal only three: the sacrifice of The Consecration of Spring, the death of the swan and Electra. (The Auditorium, 8-9/VII)
