After the Second World War many Nazis took refuge in Argentina and adopted false identities. “They were people playing a character, they became quite theatrical. They invented a story, a biography, acted out their lives even in front of their relatives, pretended to be who they were not for forty years, until in some cases they were discovered and in others they were not", remembers the Argentinian director Mariano Pensotti ( Buenos Aires, 1973). This theatricality, the eternal representation, fascinated Pensotti's company and was one of the starting points of La obra, a production where Nazis, Jews, impostors and even echoes of the conflict in the Middle East are mixed. A work that reflects on the guilt, the victims, the executioners and the marks of the violence with which they arrive today and tomorrow at El Canal de Salt, at the Temporada Alta festival.
"To us as a group - he explains - we have always found it extremely interesting that Argentina was, after the Second World War, one of the countries that hosted the most Nazis and at the same time the one with the largest Jewish community in America. Latin and one of the largest in the world. It created invisible, hidden tensions that you can trace to this day. This is present in the work, as if they were different layers of violence that make up today's society".
Another fascination was added to this. Like Esparreguera, "in Argentina and Brazil - points out Pensotti - there are large community plays that involve hundreds of people and once a year they put on a performance. This begins to change their lives. In Brazil, in New Jerusalem, in one of the poorest areas of the country, the Passion of Christ is reproduced with more than 500 actors who are electricians, hairdressers, workers, who one day a year transform into Christ, into Mary Magdalena, in Romans. And it seemed very interesting to us how participating in a fiction transforms real life. In addition, the performance is managed by one of these Brazilian evangelical churches allied with political parties, and what was a popular celebration turned into a great telenovela, a Hollywood production with all the money of the churches. A theatrical fact has been co-opted by a political cause, which is also in The work".
In the show, says Pensotti, reality and fiction are mixed in a kind of "fictional documentary". It tells the story of Simon Frank, a Pole of Jewish origin who arrives in Argentina after the World War. Most of his family has died in the Holocaust and he goes to a small town where he starts to build something mysterious in the countryside. A great scenography to represent a play". Initially it is a monologue where he explains his life and moves the neighbors. But slowly he builds almost cinematic sets where he reproduces places from his native Warsaw. And over time he incorporates the people of the area as actors in the piece.
"Representing the play is changing the lives of the town's inhabitants. Everything develops until the beginning of the millennium, when it is discovered that Frank was not who he said he was", says Pensotti, and explains that in his set "a theater director from the Middle East, Walid Mansour, goes to Argentina to investigate Frank's work and calls on local actors to recreate the experience of participating in it. It's a work within another, a little matryoshka". "It has to do with a certain idea of the world's baroque as a theater, as a representation, but it is also a small investigation into how many traces of recent violence there are in today's societies", he concludes. In this regard, he emphasizes that it is the first time it has been performed since the conflict broke out in Gaza: "Seeing it now adds another layer of meaning if we think about the different historical layers of violence that are forming our present."
