What were dozens of people doing this weekend walking in circles on Sant Adrià de Besòs beach? The beach is closed to the public due to the presence of old industrial waste, classified as potentially carcinogenic. The Mossos d’Esquadra came to witness on Saturday, despite the fact that everything was anecdotal.
What was happening was not an African dance that wanted to encourage rain or a choreography starring a sect, as some of those present jokingly suggested, but an itinerant play – dubbed What is water? – in which the audience, without knowing it, played a secondary character.
“This is a poetic itinerary in which we work on what is the relationship of the sea with us and with the political and social sphere. We ask ourselves what water is, and this is not so far from looking at the meaning of life”, director and performer Marc Caellas, one of the main protagonists, along with dancer Corinne Spitalier and the Esteban Feune de Colombi, the other face of the company La Soledad, of what they have described as itinerant drama. All of them have dedicated the show this weekend to their friend, the New York author Peter Kaldheim, who died on Friday in Barcelona, ??on the stage of the Cronopios hall while giving a humorous monologue.
“It’s good to come with thighs because we’ll be walking. Walks are a constant part of his performances”, said the writer Robert Juan-Cantavella, present in the audience with his family. “Let’s see what we do this time. I followed them to a performance in Buenos Aires and we ended up going into a bank, where one of them read a letter of protest to the director”. The attendees looked at each other, but accepted the game, expectant of the surprises that might come.
The main objective was to continue with the proposed itinerary, which started on the same bus that took the participants from the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) – the epicenter of the Kosmopolis festival, where the action takes place – to the mouth of the Besòs river, at one time the most polluted in Spain. On the road, everyone was able to listen to a podcast in which details were advanced, as the title of the play was inspired by a speech that the writer Foster Wallace gave during the 2005 graduation ceremony at Kenyon College in Ohio , in the USA.
Once the feet hit the ground, the performance took on a vindictive nature. “In every town we go to, we try to talk about some aspect of the environment. That’s why we do a residency a week before to study the terrain”, Caellas said. This time, the protest was led by the ornithologist Xavi Larruy, who warned that, “although the deputation preserves a section of the Besòs river park from human presence, there continues to be a tremendous traffic of tourists, dog walkers and cruising ” or, what is the same, the practice of having sexual relations in public spaces. “These final meters were the ideal space in which fauna and flora could thrive, generating an ecological environment. But if we fail to comply, we burden the environment”, he lamented.
The intervention continued with other scenographies, in which there was no shortage of water dancers, batons directing the sea, boats captained by local fishermen or theater on the beach. “We like to be varied and that there is a bit of everything. Performance, music, dance, documentary theatre, more cinematographic scenes, poetry…”. It is a project that gradually adapts to the different realities of the places where it is performed and whose artists—beyond the trio formed by Caellas, Feune and Spitalier—reside in the locality they visit, which until now have been the Mexican Veracruz, Cadiz, Cangas de Morrazo and Finisterre, where everything arose.
“Unwittingly, this seems to have become a maritime work, since until now all of its buildings have had the sea. But we do not rule out anything in the future. We can do something similar in a lake, for example”, acknowledged Caellas. Wherever it is, the show “has rope”, in the words of its protagonists, and all thanks to an audience that “seems more willing than ever to participate in risky propositions that move away from theaters, cinemas, museums and other places where culture theoretically arises”, they conclude.
