Dossier Night Just Before the Forests

Index AlmaViva Teatro 3 Night Just Before the Forests 4 Credits and Technical Rider 5 Reviews 6 Contact 6

AlmaViva Teatro

www.almavivateatro.com

Night Just Before the Forests

The company AlmaViva Teatro was created in 2007. From the very beginning, the productions fall under two types of creative process: The first one is focused on contemporary staging of theatrical texts from the Spanish Golden Age that had deep social meaning. In this context we can find productions such as Los Comendadores de Córdoba (2007), in which we have addressed gender violence (it was presented at the Almagro International Classical Theatre Festival); El Hamete de Toledo (2010), where the issue of immigration was the topic (both texts by Lope de Vega); El Pleito Matrimonial del Cuerpo y el Alma (2008), for the Festival of Corpus Christie Yepes (Toledo) and La Hija del Aire (2009), by Calderón de la Barca. A rather more risky project was S – Segismundo in the Mirror of Semiramis, intertextual research creation based on Calderonian texts “Life is a Dream” and “The Daughter of Air”.

Among the most classic productions stand the three-time shows Don Juan Tenorio (2011-2013), staged outdoors at the vast Campo de la Cebada (La Latina, Madrid), and the latest creation of the company: Fuente Ovejuna – Essay from Violence, which premiered in July 2013 and is still being presented within the repertoire of the company.

On the other hand, the company is committed to a staging of contemporary texts: The Secret Rapture, by David Hare (for the Escena Contemporánea 2010 Festival) is just an example.

AlmaViva Teatro now dives into a new challenge under this second type of creative process: Night Just Before the Forests.

AlmaViva Teatro

www.almavivateatro.com

Night Just Before the Forests

Night Just Before the Forests, desperate monologue written by French author Bernard-Marie Koltès between 1976 and 1977, was firstly staged in 1977 at the Avignon Off Festival. An almost indecipherable hermetic text that sounds poetic at the same time, taking the viewer to a personal universe: an alienated prostituted everyday. Koltés introduces a man – a foreigner that might just be every man – adrift in such reality, who holds back people in a dark street where everything seems to get confused. Confused himself, he tries to express all the ideas that assault him to that “you” he has been looking at, turning around the corner. He might be telling his idea to a person… or all persons.

The performance AlmaViva Teatro presents in this dossier is the result of a process of research and investigation over six months of labour. The one thousand and more parts of the text, the altered sequential façades, or its legitimacy for a contemporary audience have been the keystones during the artistic residence in which the show was conceived.

José Gonçalo Pais en La noche justo antes de los bosques.

FOTO: Noemí Sánchez.

A man. All men. A time. All times.

In this creation, as we said before, we find a lost guy trying to hold back someone in the middle of a street, making an effort to be listened. But we also find each one of the individuals who he stopped. Those who did not stop. All the people he knew in his wanderings on Friday nights. We get to know him through the legacy he left recorded on a video camera for posterity (which is precisely what Koltès did with his text).

AlmaViva Teatro explores the cry from one man who can be all men and women. A man living in a certain time, who lived – or will ever live – for all time. Because theatre is a mirror game and should be universal; every person coming into the hall should feel that the man who is now showing us his situation could be themselves, at any time. A theatrical proposal filled with poetry. The atmospheres engender an aesthetic experience at the same time poetic and contemporary. The use of new technologies through a live video camera resizes the viewing experience and makes it even closer.

We show Night Just Before the Forests as a whole creative production in which the audience is part of it.

It’s a cry in the silence of an empty street where, if you have a minute, we tell you our idea, brother.

www.almavivateatro.com

Credits Performer

José Gonçalo Pais Set Design

Jacobo García Costume Design Juan Antonio Bello Lighting Design César Barló Sound AlmaViva Teatro Fotography Noemí Sánchez Graphic Design José Gonçalo Pais Communication Elena López Translation Sergi Belbel Production AlmaViva Teatro Director

César Barló

Technical Rider Stage - Open space, minimum 8 x 4 m.

- Possibility to have frames suspended from a counterweight bar Stage lighting - 8 PC 1,2 kW - 12 PAR 64 1 kW #2 - 4 PAR 64 1 kW #5 - 8 Profile spots (ERS) 25/50 750Kw - 4 Scoops 1000w - 24-channel lighting console Sound - 4 channel sound board - 4 loudspeakers 500 W (potency according to the space dimensions)

Reviews

Night Just Before the Forests

Distribution Contact http://impulsarts.com/distribucion

José Gonçalo Pais crosses our mind and our desires with insulting primitive honesty in this monologue in which we all we dialogue. (...) César Barló, young director, wise and effective, tames space, atmospheres and hidden harmonies.

The use of cameras, film and music is perfect and stands to the service of the overall concept.

(+34) 657 38 24 03 ines@impulsarts.com Impuls ARTS @impuls_ARTS

Susurros desde la Biselia – “Tragycom”

An abstract staging, beautiful in its own way and full of symbolism. Retched with the same rawness of the text itself.

Very interesting use of the camera, making us feel the actor’s face in our hands.

Producer:

Jose Antonio Alba, “En un Entreacto”

Achieves the tension and get the text to be a line of support on which the message that supports all action travels. I also find that the combination of director and actor has led to the best work I’ve seen by both. A text to remember that will definitely go home with the public for days.

Julio Castro, “La República Cultural”

It is astonishing all that José Gonçalo does, it’s brutal.

Every gesture, every breath conveys a level of anger and incomprehension that shakes you. And of course, superbly directed by César Barló, from AlmaViva Teatro, in another tremendous outpouring of creativity, good criteria and ability to understand a text quite difficult to unravel.

David García Vázquez, “Desde el Patio”

A theatre that retrieves the power of the word, a word that in an alluring, hypnotic way, takes hold of an audience that ends up becoming that person who the foreigner wants to retain with a feverish circular soliloquy, in which the rhythm of the words seduce you until you’re trapped.

Antonio Díaz Narváez, “Hoyenlacity.com”

José Gonçalo Pais is the actor who plays this anonymous character; an actor with an impressive ability to change and his brutal performance makes him responsible of cornering the viewer who contemplates, from his seat, stunned and without blinking, an intense emotional journey.

Ramon Rivas, “Es Madrid No Madriz” Pags. 110-111

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