English translation below

Estimulante y emotiva experiencia de “Live-art”.

ENGLISH

Gordon Craig
28 April 2013
Diario de Alcalá

Stimulating and moving “Live-Art” experience

In this bleak landscape, an authentic desert wasteland without life, in which for sloth or lack of stimulation languishes the own theatrical creation in the alcarrean capital (region in Spain), the appearance of a performance as the one Karla Kracht and Andrés Beladiez presented the day before yesterday at Espacio Karabra, constitutes a real event and should make us think about what happens with the culture in Guadalajara, that we have to tick as exceptional an event that, in a community with a minimum artistic concerns and real interest for theatre, it should be part of the normal daily life. And when I talk about “artistic concerns and interest for theatre” I obviously do not refer to the tiresome and repetitive annual handling of Don Juan Tenorio, neither to the proliferation of living cribs, neither to other multiple outdated manifestations of popular folklore that appear as mushrooms in autumn in all corners of the province, when the heat of the spring start rage the province.

But let’s talk about the performance in question. Zoomwooz is a multidisciplinary work, a video performance – in the words of the authors- that put into play simultaneously multiple languages and forms of expression: music, video, shadow play, etc… without excluding the words of a narrator that intervenes occasionally as one more of the ensemble of expressive elements, dis-hierarchized, to configure the special atmosphere between dreamlike and naif that brings us back to the world of comic, but also to the disturbing universe of science fiction – in this undisguised homage to the films of Larry Wachowski, with which the performance initiates. Because in reality it’s a performance in all aspects, as the greatest part of the projected images are generated directly by the performers, recording with a mini-camera a series of characters and objects in the same moment (cardboard cut outs and tiny billboards prepared before and scattered around the stage floor and lateral auxiliary modules) and mixing these images with other ones, generated by the computer and thus, in real-time.

Well, we are witnesses of the same process of the generation of a virtual space (cybernetic), from within a real space, specific, figurative, formed by the materiality of small objects and artefacts and because of the physical presence of the manipulators and invited to participate in a stimulating experience in a time-space shared with all those present in the room. Spectators and “actors”, inexcusable premise, so we can talk about a theatrical performance “tout court”. But also, and this I think is one of the strong lines of the work, behind this ceremony of exposure of simulation, allow me to say it like this, there is a critique to the power of media manipulation, a profound reflection about how the mass media are conforming a devalued perception of the real, how they move the indifference about the information they transmit (Lehmann), how the act erodes in the same moment of direct communication, with our speaker (“look at me firmly, yes, look at me and tell me that everything is different”, the narrator exclaims in a moment; and in the next line: “let’s talk about ourselves, as if we had never been lonely”).

But above all, what you can read between the lines is the bewilderment (“Where am I? What is this? Is that me?”) the daze, the vertigo which the images of memory produce ( the waving of victorious flags in the wind, the inflamed harangues of the enlightened and visionary, the noise of the war machine,…) superimposed with variegated whirlwind to the visions of a chaotic present (” live expands and escapes terrorised into a chaotic concert of misplaced notes”), committed to the orgy of consumption and a future of no hope. And one can listen also, well perceivable, though faint and tenuous because of the tiredness and weariness, a scream of rebellion that peaks the beauty standard and poetry, calling to combat the fear and create zones of resistance, against conformism and discouragement, against indifference and barbarism.