Complete guide to El Pasado

performance
prospectus
mariano pensotti
Un pasado es un animal grotesco
FEB 9- 12, 2012
Text & direction : Mariano Pensotti
Performers : Pilar Gamboa, Javier Lorenzo,
Santiago Gobernori, María Ines Sancerni
Set & costume design : Mariana Tirantte
Light design : Matías Sendón (& Ricardo Sica)
Music : Diego Vainer
Sound Engineer : Demian Chorovicz
Assistant director : Leandro Orellano
Technical and production assistant :
Juan Pablo Gomez
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Note from OtB....................................2
Director’s Note...................................3
Beginner’s Guide..............................5
Bio....................................................6
The Whirligig of Buenos Aires.........7
Funder Credits.................................11
A NOTE FROM OTB
Mariano Pensotti drew inspiration from the song “The Past is a
Grotesque Animal” by the pop rock freaks Of Montreal (3/24
Showbox Market) when making his play with the same name.
Apparently, he listened to the song nonstop when writing the script.
At almost 11 minutes, the song has heft and scale. It’s epic. It speaks
of a lifetime of longing, regret and rage that probably never
materializes but is deeply felt. As Mariano told the New York Times,
“The image of the past as some grotesque animal that changes shape
every time you think about it is so close to what happens with the past
and the lived experiences when you try to remember them or retell
them in the present. The past is always changing.”
It’s hard to explain what it is about the song that’s so addictive but after
listening to it several times in a row, one may feel tempted to steal a car
and drive to Juarez: “I’m flunking out, I’m flunking out, I’m gone, I’m
just gone/But at least I author my own disaster.” The lyrics and conceit
of the song are simple but penetrating; the story and the sentiment
resonate. Similarly, it’s hard to explain what it is about Mariano’s
play that evokes the same thoughts and emotions. Somehow he
manages to make an hour and forty five minutes feel like thirty minutes
as he spans ten years in the lives of four characters. Maybe it’s his roots
in film that allow him to take on such breadth of material with such
ease. Maybe it’s cinematic language that allows us to be drawn in
so effectively. Maybe it’s the rumination on fleeting youth and distant
memories that hooks the viewer. Maybe it’s the revolving stage that not
only keeps the action moving but reminds us that life never stops until it
does. It’s difficult to say; it just works. Mariano’s strokes are quietly bold.
What’s new is his voice. His peculiar handling of material – text,
staging, physicality and sound –constitute something unique.
Newness doesn’t matter here.
Congratulations to Mariano and his electric cast and skilled crew on
the occasion of their first tour to the United States. Almost five weeks
down and only two to go!
Sarah Wilke and Lane Czaplinski
director’s note
Is it possible in these times to create great fictions that contain what we
imagine together with real events from our lives and the lives of the
people we know? How does the history of our cities influence our own
personal history? What happens when fiction is set within a concrete
temporal framework? How can we recount ten years in the life
of a person? How do we incorporate the most recent history- upon
which we haven’t reflected in excess-into our own more excessive stories?
The stories from four characters over ten years, from 1999 to 2009.
Brief, interspersed fragments tell the individual stories of four people
from Buenos Aires between the ages of 25-35, the moment one stops
being who one thinks one is to become the person one is, with the
occasional reference to the socio-economic changes in those ten years.
Some of these stories focus on everyday situations, whereas others more
on the extraordinary. Some include documentary or autobiographical
elements and some others plunge openly into fiction. In turn, each
story drifts and branches into smaller
secondary stories.
The attempt is to narrate a multiple array of stories, in the manner of
the excessive nineteenth-century narrations, in which ambitious and
exorbitant fiction is contained within a precise historical and temporal
framework.
The play is acted by only four actors, enclosed in a
rotating round stage. They alone embark on the heroic
task to narrate and perform that multiplicity of stories,
bringing to life dozens of characters and situations.
A mega fiction which is narrated with minimum
stage resources.
Ten years ago, I started to collect damaged photos that
a photo lab near home would throw away every month.
I didn’t know what for. The lab closed down a while
ago - hardly anyone has their photos developed
nowadays. I went back to look through the damaged
images that I’d collected. Blurred and discarded
fragments from the lives of strangers. Many seemed to be people
from my own generation: A faulty chronicle of a decade.
I remembered a quote by Balzac, in which he talked about his art
as the attempt to “photograph the soul of people and their time”.
I decided to take some of the photos and try to recreate the ambitious
spirit of these nineteenth-century narrations, telling the stories of four
characters of my generation over ten years. I used the damaged images
as the basis upon which to create them. The result was a highly narrative,
literary text, full of events and quite-impossible-to-represent situations,
and at the same time with much freedom. I thought of the idea
of “the identity as a narrative construct”: we are what we narrate.
And also in how life becomes fiction.
The Past is a Grotesque Animal is the title of a song by the band
Of Montreal. I listened to it a lot while I was writing the text. Its
excessive duration and ambitious narrative made me feel it close to
what I was developing. I decided to use the name and include the lyrics
in the play when the stories reach their end.
Narrating the past is like using a voice-over that could give sense to the
scattered fragments of a film that is lost forever. Aided by the epic effort
of four actors that tell and perform a multiple array of stories, the past
arises in this play as an animal glimpsed in our dream jungle. An animal
that changes shape each time we remember it. A grotesque animal.
Mariano Pensotti
beginner’s guide to
mariano pensotti
1. Mariano Pensotti is based in Buenos Aires, a cultural
hub of the world right now that has been fostering some
incredible talents and art. One of his peers in the dance
world is fellow OtB alum Diana Szeinblum. Compare their
works side by side by also watching Alaska this weekend.
2. Literary arts play an important role in the creation of
Mariano’s works. For El pasado, Mariano references
the writing style of 19th century writers such as
Georges Perec and Roberto Bolaños.
3. The impact of visual arts is apparent in El pasado, but
was even more obvious in his first work to come to North
America. La Marea staged individual scenes in the streets
of Vancouver BC, each one unfolding through subtitles
projected near the set. See images and read about the
individual scenes of La Marea.
4. Pensotti is also equally influenced by film. He studied at
Dramatic Arts Instituto Universitario Nacional de Artes
and has honed a style of playwrighting and direction that
reflects that. Filmmakers like Fassbinder, Resnais, Godard
and Herzog are amongst the ones that Pensotti claims
have had an impact on him. Although you won’t be able
to see it, the entire backstage looks more like a film set
complete with a storyboard for each scene (all 72 of them!).
5. The music of Of Montreal also played a role in the creation
of El pasado, even lending a song title to the name of the
show. Pensotti told the New York Times about this:
“I really love their records and especially this song; it was
so related to my intentions with this play. The image of
the past as some grotesque animal that changes shape
every time you think about it is so close to what happens
with the past and the lived experiences when you try
to remember them or retell them in the present.
The past is always changing.”
BIO
Mariano Pensotti is an argentine author and theater director.
He studied cinema, visual arts and theater in Buenos Aires, Spain and
Italy. In theater as an author and director he created more than fifteen
performances in the past ten years. Among his latest creations are El
Pasado es un animal grotesco (The past is a grotesque animal) (2010/2012)
premiered at Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires and presentd at
Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Festival de Otoño (Madrid),
Theaterformen (Hannover), Hebbel am ufer (Berlin), Auabirlewen
(Bern), Norwich & Norfolk Festival (England), Kampnagel Festival
(Hamburg), Zürcher Theater Spektakel (Zürich), Tempo Festival (Rio
de Janeiro), Fiac (Bahia), Rotterdamse Schowburg (Rotterdam), Frascati
Theater (Amsterdam). Sometimes I think I can see you (2010/2011)
premiered in Berlin at Hebbel am Ufer as part of Ciudades Paralelas
Festival and presented in Buenos Aires, Cologne, Brussels, Zürich,
Warsaw, Salamanca, Copenhage, Helsinki, Girona and Paris.
Encyclopaedia of unlived lives (2010) premiered at Schauspielhaus Graz
(Austria) and presented during Steirischer Herbst Festival and La Marea
(2005/2011) premiered at the V Buenos Aires International Festival and
later on invited to the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Hebbel am Ufer
Theater (Berlin), Homo Novus Festival (Riga), Dublin Festival (Ireland),
Festival Automne en Normandie (Rouen), Carrefour International de
Théâtre (Québec), Festival Transamériques (Montréal), Yokohama
(Japan), Festival Temporada Alta (Girona), Norfolk & Norwich Festival
(England), Metropolis Copenhague (Denmark) and Push Festival
(Vancouver).
Mariano Pensotti has become one of the most noted experimental
directors throughout the world. He has been heralded as one of Latin
America’s brightest theater talents and he and his company tour
extensively throughout the year. He formed the Grupo Marea together
with set designer Mariana Tirantte, light designer Matías Sendón and
musician Diego Vainer. In his work he developed two different lines, one
composed by stage performances where he writes his own very literary
texts and the play is strongly based in the work with the actors, and in
parallel he produced several site specific performances where the main
intention is to create a particular contrast in between fiction and reality
with fiction placed in public places.
www.marianopensotti.com
The Whirligig of Buenos Aires
The Past Is a Grotesque Animal by Mariano Pensotti
by Cynthia Steele, University of Washington
Mariano Pensotti’s new play is at once a snapshot of four individual
twenty-somethings living in Buenos Aires over the past decade
(specifically, from 1999 to 2009) and a portrait of his own generation of
urban, middle-class Argentines. The action transpires when the four
protagonists are between 25 and 35 years old—the time in life when one’s
personal and professional futures are often decided.
The history portrayed in the play is the very recent past, the past that has
just ended, or has given the illusion of ending, because every time the
characters recall it, it is born again, like some fantastic animal changing
shape each time it is evoked.
One Argentine critic has referred to the generation portrayed in
Pensotti’s play as “the first Menem generation after Menem.” Menem
was, of course, associated with liberalization, privatization, and the turn
away from support of popular movements associated with Peronism.
His government came to be associated, in the minds of many Argentines,
with self-absorption, consumerism, materialism and superficiality.
The price paid by all Argentines for the policies set in place first by the
military dictatorship, and then by Menem and his successors, resulted
in an unprecedented economic catastrophe in December of 2000,
bankrupting the middle class and plummeting half of the Argentinean
populace below the poverty line.
Pensotti has said in interviews that he sees his generation, which was
about fifteen when Menem came to power, as a “defective generation.”
Unlike their parents, they have had no great social projects, have explored
no alternative lifestyles. At the same time they are a do-it-yourself
generation, one of survivors, picking themselves up after each tumble
and forging on, stubbornly hoping the next time will be different. This is
played out by the four actors scrambling to play dozens of roles, in four
cramped compartments on the revolving merry-go-round of Argentine
history. Since no one point of view is capable of telling the whole story,
the four actors pass a microphone back and forth and narrate the action
for us as we observe it.
It is a generation convinced it is destined for greatness—or at least for
wealth, success and glamour, for transcending the mediocrity of their
parents’ lives. As evidenced by the exodus of hundreds of Argentines in
the early 2000s, it is a generation persuaded that the future lies elsewhere,
that happiness depends on turning into someone else. Vicky steals the life
savings from her butcher father, to finance a bohemian life in Paris with
her boyfriend. Like the other protagonists, though, no matter how far
she travels or how hard she tries to escape, she always ends up back in
Argentina, trapped by ‘the grotesque animal of the past.’ This is a
generation haunted by the inevitability of failure and disappointment,
even as it is launching its next self-promotion campaign.
Pensotti began his career as a filmmaker, and this formation is evident
thematically—two of the four main characters are connected to film,
one as an aspiring director and the other as a young woman aspiring
to live the life portrayed by the Nouvelle Vague. For the most part the
futures that await them are grim parodies of the lives they aspired to,
with the would-be filmmaker making tawdry beer commercials, and
the aspiring bohemian Parisian working at a chintzy theme park about
the life of Christ.
Also, while we watch the actors portray snapshots in the lives of the
characters, they also take turns providing us with their own narrative
and commentary on the events, much like the voice-over narration in a
film. The props are minimalist: a scarf turns into a headband, or an actor
dons a pair of glasses, to signal a change in character. Pensotti has
compared this play to a two-hour travelling shot. In his previous plays
the director has made extensive use of video cameras and intertitles,
among other filmic devices. Pensotti has also said that he imagines his
plays as series of slides or art installations.
There are also many literary influences in his work. Pensotti has
explained that his inspiration for writing the play included sweeping
nineteenth-century novels, with their ambitious scope and myriad
interlocking characters and plots. Another inspiration for the play was
photography. Pensotti found a box of damaged photographs in an
old photography shop in his neighborhood—at a time when digital
photography had made developing film obsolete--, and he was reminded
of Balzac’s aspiration to “photograph the soul of the people and their
time.” Pensotti’s is a generation saturated with exposure to the media,
as we see from the ubiquitous television sets perpetually turned on to
soap operas, news, etc. as a backdrop to the characters’ travails.
Marketing executive Mario finds a bizarre gift at his doorstep—a severed
hand in a box—and, while he continues relentlessly climbing the
corporate ladder, he sticks the hand in his freezer and obsesses about
deciphering its riddle. Who were the victim and the aggressor? What
were the circumstances? Who sent him the package and why? In the
severed hand, one is tempted to see a metaphor for the country’s legacy
of torture and disappearance, the brutal dashing of the hopes and ideals
of this generation’s parents, and the lingering fear that the violence
could return. This is also the first globalized generation, whose cultural
references are drawn from many cultures and national histories. The
play alludes to the Twin Towers and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as it
does to the election of Latin America’s first indigenous President,
Bolivian Evo Morales, and to the Argentine economic collapse of 2000.
Pensotti adopted his title from the key song on the break-through album
Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (2007), by the U.S. indie rock group
‘Of Montreal.’ He says that he listened constantly to the song while
he was writing the play, and that he felt an affinity with its ambitious
scope—the song lasts eleven minutes—and with its intense, dark imagery:
The sun is out
It melts the snow that fell yesterday
Makes you wonder
Why it bothered. . . .
Though our love project has so much potential
But it’s like we weren’t made for this world
Though i wouldn’t really wanna meet someone who was.
Do I have to scream in your face?
I’ve been dodging lamps and vegetables
Throw it all in my face
I don’t care-Let’s just have some fun
Let’s tear the shit apart
Let’s tear the fucking house apart
Let’s tear our fucking bodies apart,
Let’s just have some fun.
Pensotti has noted a punk dimension in his work. The play shares with
punk art and music a belief in self-reliance and authenticity, an impulse
toward anarchy, a certain anti-authoritarianism, and a mixture of high
energy and fatalism.
.
Cheerful but morose. Sincere but ironic. Emotional catharsis as
truncated therapy. Argentina as a giddy whirligig of failed plans and
undying dreams.
Production: Grupo Marea
Coproduction: Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires,
Theaterformen (Hannover), Norwich & Norfolk Festival, Festival de Otoño de Madrid
Seasonal support for OtB is provided by
This production is sponsored by
El pasado es un animal grotesco photos by Almudena Crespo
ontheboards.org