We had seen photos of the montage in other cities, it is true, but the sensation of entering through the middle floor of the Fabià Puigserver room and discovering a real beach at the foot, with a sun that breaks the stones and people happily toasting themselves, is a impression that will not be easy to forget.
Some may believe that nothing ever happens on the beach, but those who are regulars know that, despite the spirit of dolce far niente that characterizes it, many things happen. As happens at Sun, the performance and popular opera proposal that the Lithuanian creators Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė have brought to the Teatre Lliure to open the season.
They premiered it in 2019 in Venice and won the Golden Lion at the Art Biennale, and yesterday the Barcelona public was able to see why. It is an opera, yes, with choirs, arias and duets, such as the siren's aria and the duet of the distant couple, but with synthesizer music and a deep, indirect and not at all instructive message about the ecological footprint we leave human beings on our vacations, doing something as apparently harmless as lying on the sand to let ourselves be caressed by the sun and the sea.
Every half hour, a group of 60 people enters the Teatre Lliure in this rectangular gallery that surrounds the Sun beach that has been created with 30 tons of sand brought from Tarragona and that, although it is reused after the opera, it does not stop be a contradiction to the spirit of the lyrics.
The Lithuanian creators, in Tuesday's conversation with the media, justified themselves by saying that we are all contradictory, and that precisely this is the idea of the montage on the climate crisis.
The songs, which follow each other on a loop that repeats roughly every hour, are performed by the characters occupying the arena: a workaholic who freaks out on vacation; his wife, who dreams of great trips and that his son bathes in all the seas and oceans of the world; the kids who play with a ball with the drawing of the Earth and who, when caught by two of the volunteers who participate in the show, one of them yesterday was RAC1's colleague Xavi Pardo, remember Chaplin's movements in The Great Dictator; the twins who dream of a world of 3D printers that will manufacture food when all species on Earth have become extinct, the boy who reads Cavall Fort magazine, a man who makes self-defined and puts sunscreen on his wife, a sleeping dog , a couple exercising in the sand, another playing badminton...
A hypnotic opera with moving lyrics, which grows exponentially by being seen, instead of on a conventional stage, in a place as seemingly innocent as a beach.
Catalan version, here
