Pont Flotant: the theater that moves when you least expect it

The Valencian company Pont Flotant practices a very personal theater that is the result of two decades of collective research and is characterized by its calculated naturalness and a particular mixture of the everyday with the transcendent.

Let's say they are the opposite of bombastic and pretentious theater.

His works find emotion in what is usually defined as "the simplicity of small things" and that is why they move when you least expect it.

Like life itself.

Or the memories: suddenly a conversation you had with your mother thirty years ago comes to mind and you shed a tear.

Or you imagine your daughter in another thirty years when maybe you're gone... and she gives you one of those tears that end in hiccups.

You can also suddenly burst out laughing when you remember that time you were with a friend and you couldn't stop laughing because of something silly that happened to you.

that's basically

his new show, which is being performed these days at the Teatro de la Abadía in Madrid.

There are only two characters on stage, Àlex Cantó and Jesús Muñoz, who play themselves.

They introduce themselves with their names from the beginning and show us a canvas on which a timeline is painted that begins with the birth of their grandparents and ends with their grandchildren, with the particularity that not only the birth dates are inscribed and the deaths of those who were born or died but also those who have not yet done so, including those of their own deaths.

Then they take out another cloth with another timeline: that of the universe from the Big Bang to its extinction.

There is nothing.

Kilometers and kilometers of cloth that are unrolled between laughter and folding until they see that it is materially impossible to reach the beginning and the end.

It is not necessary to explain what they want to tell us about this.

However, from that moment on, Àlex and Jesús do nothing but add value to that insignificance by recreating the first timeline they presented to us: their own.

They summon their grandparents and their parents to a large table prepared for a family meal and they interpret them themselves with great humor and above all love: those recurrent jokes of the grandparents, the mother's manias, the father's occurrences.

The voices of the different generations mingle, but there comes a time when the older ones give up their chairs to make room for the children and then for the grandchildren, the circular platform on which the table is placed begins to rotate... The cycle of the life, finally.

Nothing we don't know, of course, but told with such simplicity and truth that it disarms.

total eclipse

Creation and direction: Pont Flotant (Àlex Cantó, Joan Collado, Jesús Muñoz and Pau Pons).

Cast: Àlex Cantó and Jesús Muñoz.

Abbey Theatre.

Madrid.

Until June 19. 

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