Chronicle by Raoul Horn
The Eurothalia Festival started with the show The Mountain, by Agrupación Señor Serrano. On stage: four actors, cameras, detailed models of the Himalaya Mountain range, four worktables with constantly changing objects. The show itself is an Eisenstein-type montage twin, an hour and ten minutes of historical fragments, short film sequences, fake-news, all juxtaposed in a fast tempo. Each of the images presented takes its narrative to the end, leaving no gaps. The show time is an essentialized time, full of messages that we can call real. All those messages sequenced one after another have an immediate impact on the mind concerned with analysing multiple scenes.
What was it about? Too easily said about the Truth. For this, as it appears from the show, is full of complications, with ramifications at each end of the idea, not at all simple or pure. We tend to characterize concepts by adjectives, and they do nothing but blur the essential, "embellish" superficially. If something happens without any witnesses to document it, does that mean it didn't happen? 230 meters from the top of Everest, the ascent of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine is nonchalantly shrouded in fog. As if Nature has drawn a curtain before the "truth", giving it the opportunity to change. Further on, we are told in the show, a team of climbers discovered Mallory's body on the north side of Everest in 1999, but without the camera that was meant to validate the "truth" and without the portrait of his wife, Ruth, to whom Mallory had promised to place the photo in the snow on the top of the mountain. Two Truths? Two Perspectives?
One character is Vladimir Putin. The tonality of the name characterizes it directly and concisely. Putin is a mask, an emoticon, he has a cold and neutral face, bald, floating on a digitized background. It immediately made me think of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, which, this time, does not prefer blood, but smokva. The actors change this “mask” one by one. A simultaneously playful and political mimesis. We see Orson Welles in different temporal poses; he is worried, then indifferent in terms of the radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel, The War of the Worlds and the reactions created by it.
The montage, be it verbal or image, manipulates. That is why it was also theorized, then put into operation on the film, as a subtle form of manipulation. Those Russians... The actor is no longer the one who interprets in the literal sense of the word, but he is a thoroughbred documentary filmmaker, a type of historian. But let's not overlook the camera in his hands. While one actor is filming the scene absorbed, another one is next to him, arranging the small inert characters, the objects, he causes storms and snow, that is, he directs and interprets differently, thus making a redocumentation.
The Mountain does not offer acting virtuosity (in the traditional sense), Oscar or Tony Awards grimaces, but it makes you think. It's good, especially today, to think.
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“Theatre Chronicle @ Eurothalia” is a programme conceived by Daniela Șilindean together with the team of the German State Theatre Timișoara, within the Eurothalia 2023 European Theatre Festival, held between 20-30 September 2023, financed by the National Cultural Program Timișoara - European Capital of Culture in 2023.
