In November 1995, the Catalan company La Fura dels Baus and the Welsh Brith Gof presented a joint show at the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona (although they preferred to classify it as "experience" or " work in progress ") that not only developed on the physical stage where the audience was, but also in Madrid and Cardiff, where performances were performedSimultaneous that could be seen on screen through live connections. Two years later, La Fura repeated the experiment alone at the Malic Theater in Barcelona, connected on that occasion with the German city of Freiburg, to later replicate it also in Tárrega, Salt and Antwerp. "A surprising planetary work thanks to what La Fura calls 'digital theater', that is, the friction between the performing arts and the Internet," wrote Pablo Ley, the chronicler of EL PAÍS who attended the performance at Malic.
We are talking about the 1990s, when the expression “digital theater” was not even coined. "No one understood us. At the time, hardly anyone had access to the Internet yet, and videoconferencing seemed like science fiction. Using all that to make theater looked Martian. They said we were geeks ”, recalls Pep Gatell, one of the founders of La Fura, who coordinated those projects. “After those two experiences, we abandoned that line of work. We must also think that at that time the connections were very slow, we had to click on the video input a few seconds before because the signal was delayed ... well, crazy. Very funny, but very difficult ”, he adds.
Who would have guessed that 25 years later a pandemic was going to make "digital theater" fashionable. And that those videoconference transmissions that La Fura tried in a rudimentary way would be our daily bread. They were pioneers without knowing it. So now they were not going to be the last to present a virtual show during the confinement by the coronavirus: The Curse of the Crown, an adaptation of Macbeth, the Shakespeare classic, in whose creation some thirty artists from different backgrounds have worked remotely. disciplines (performing arts, visual arts, science, design, engineering) for two weeks. It was broadcast live twice (April 28 and May 8) and a full recording of the result can now be seen on YouTube.
Directed by Gatell, this Macbeth is a complex web of live scenes, prerecorded videos, computer-designed imagery, and fast-paced music that visually plays on iconic elements of Shakespeare's plot: The Killer Knife, The Bloody Hands , the crown ... many times its effect is amplified by its multiplication or partitioning in different windows that are simultaneously displayed on the screen. Above all, a soniquete flies over, the leitmotif of the proposal, which is one of the most famous phrases of the original work, “what's done is done”, which works as a link of the classic text with the current situation and which refers to an act or circumstance that supposes a before and after, that makes nothing be the same and there is no going back: either Macbeth's crime or the coronavirus crisis. Besides there is the obvious play on words implicit in the title between corona and coronavirus.
Beyond that conceptual parallelism, Gatell confesses that other of the reasons why they chose Macbeth for this "experiment" (as in the 1990s, they dare not call it otherwise) was the structure of the original text. "We couldn't start by creating everything. We needed a plot that was known and that we knew would work, because in two weeks we had to investigate many other things, both in terms of form and operation," he explains. To get an idea of how complex it was, suffice it to say that during the broadcast it took several councilors: one to click on the videos, another on music and another five for the five teams in which the performers were divided so that there were no gaps or silences in transitions. To which it must be added that in the second function a "more difficult still" was added with the integration of the mobile application Kalliope, developed in recent years by La Fura to offer a narrative background during its shows, complementing or amplifying aspects of the main plot, guiding viewers through the different spaces and providing advice on how to relate to their environment.
La Fura did not continue developing those crazy projects of the nineties, but in reality never abandoned research with digital tools. It wouldn't be them if they had. Let us remember that the basis of their work, what has distinguished them as a unique company throughout the world, is the “friction of disciplines”. The results of this effort are, among others, the Kalliope application and the creation two years ago of the Épica Foundation, an organization that defines itself as a "multidisciplinary learning space around the performing arts", whose experiments have served as the basis for the Creation of The Curse of the Crown, especially in terms of methodology. "We have been able to do this because we have called people who have participated in the latest workshops organized by the Foundation, so that there was sufficient complicity to to be able to work remotely. You always need a minimum face-to-face contact to be able to create as a team, "admits Gatell.
The last of these workshops, for example, dubbed Complex Systems, brought cancer research experts and artists together to simulate the movement of malignant cells within the body, while another team of philosophers studied group behaviors and another of biologists analyzed emotional impacts on the brain and memory.
In The Curse of the Crown it has also been involved in several research groups: the Department of Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Group of Cognition and Brain Plasticity of the Biomedical Research Institute of Bellvitge and the Center for Computer Vision. The first team is analyzing the creative process in a new environment such as digital theater, the second works on the impact of the virtual environment on the cognitive system and the third studies the relationships established within a creative process through technologies. computer vision.
It looks like science fiction, but it's not. It never was for La Fura dels Baus, although it has taken many years for interaction with digital systems and platforms to "normalize". "Now that people are used to it and that its use has also been triggered by confinement, it is time to continue investigating. I dare say that we are facing a paradigm shift. Not so much because I believe that from now on it will proliferate digital theater, but because this leap that we have taken during the running of the bulls will help us to better manage these tools to integrate them into traditional shows. Without a doubt, virtual will mix with face-to-face and theater will be more hybrid, "predicts Gatell. . Omen of furero .
The curse of the Crown. A creation of La Fura dels Baus / Fundación Épica. Direction: Pep Gatell. Available on Youtube.