What were dozens of people doing walking in circles on the beach of Sant Adrià de Besòs this weekend? 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 act as witnesses on Saturday, although everything remained an anecdote.
What was happening was not an African dance encouraging the rain or a choreography featuring a sect, as some of those present jokingly suggested, but rather a traveling play — baptized What is Water? — in which the audience, without knowing it, played a secondary character.
“It is a poetic itinerary in which we work on 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 trying to find the meaning of life," explains director and performer Marc Caellas, one of the main protagonists, along with dancer Corinne Spitalier and Esteban Feune from La Vanguardia. Colombi, the other face of the La Soledad company, of what they have described as itinerant dramaturgy. All of them dedicated their show this weekend to their friend, the New York author Peter Kaldheim, who died on Friday in Barcelona, on stage at the Cronopios room while performing a humorous monologue.
“You do well to come with sports shoes because we are going to walk. The walks are a constant part of his performances,” said writer Robert Juan-Cantavella, present in the audience with his family. “Let's see what we do this time. "I followed them at a performance in Buenos Aires and we ended up entering 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 could happen.
The main thing was to continue with the proposed itinerary, which began on the same bus that took the participants from the Center de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) - epicenter of the Kosmopolis festival, where the action is framed - to the mouth of the Besòs river, in its day the most polluted in Spain. On the road, everyone was able to listen to a podcast in which details were advanced, such as that the title of the work was inspired by a speech that the writer Foster Wallace gave at the 2005 graduation ceremony at Kenyon College in Ohio, USA. US
Once the feet set foot on the ground, the performance took on a vindictive tone. “In every town we go to we try to talk about some aspect of the environment. For this reason, we do a residency a week before to study the terrain,” Caellas said. This time, the protest was led by ornithologist 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 destroy the environment,” he lamented.
The intervention continued with other sets, in which there was no shortage of aquatic dancers, batons directing the sea, boats captained by local fishermen or theater on the beach. “We like to be varied and have a little bit of everything. Performance, music, dance, documentary theater, more cinematographic scenes, poetry...”. It is a project that adapts to the different realities of the places in which it is performed and whose artists—beyond the trio formed by Marc, Esteban and Corinne—reside in the town they visit, which to date have been the Mexican Veracruz, Cádiz, Cangas de Morrazo and Finisterre, where everything arose.
“Unintentionally, this seems to have become a maritime project, since until now all the venues have had the sea. But we don't rule out anything in the future. We can do something similar in a lake, for example,” Caellas acknowledged. Wherever it is, the show is “long lasting,” in the words of its protagonists, and all thanks to an audience that “seems more willing than ever to participate in risky proposals that move away from theaters, cinemas, museums and other places where culture theoretically arises,” they conclude.
