On the occasion of the fourth edition of the Festival Sempre più fuori, which took place from 8 to 19 July at the Accademia di Villa Massimo, the company Agrupación Señor Serrano – Silver Lion at the Venice Theatre Biennale 2015 – presented The Mountain, first shown in October 2020. It is important to emphasise the date when this show was first produced as 2020 was the year of the pandemic, an event that brought about a real revolution in the field of global communication. Forced to stay indoors, smartphones, computers and tablets became exclusive tools for people to connect remotely.
But what truth is there behind what can be seen and heard on these screens? The Catalan theatre company chooses to bring this question – one that has never been so topical – to the stage, not only as the show’s narrative thread, but above all, through the technical devices used to represent it.
In fact, the entire dramaturgy of The Mountain is developed on three screens through video connections whose mechanisms are made explicit by the authors working on stage. Spectators can see tiny actions taking place on models, built on tables placed on the stage, enlarged on the screens. Or they can see the projection of a real-time shot of an actor standing a few metres away in front of a set with a snowy mountain view in the background, with fog generated by a tiny smoke machine attached to the video camera.
The smoke effect, in particular, is the trick that is often used – increasingly often, unfortunately – in multimedia performing arts to envelop viewers in a sensory mystery which arouses primary emotions such as surprise, terror and shock. In a Brechtian move, however, the Agrupación reveal the source of this effect, drawing the spectators’ attention to what lies behind the veil of magical media fiction, showing them the paths of images and sounds processed by the media in the theatre itself. These include screens, stage models on tables, hand-held video cameras and drones that have become the stylistic signature of Agrupacion’s political theatre since its founding.
In The Mountain, the main subject is precisely media truth: as unattainable as the feat of climbing the summit of Everest by Englishman George Leigh Mallory in 1924, who was declared missing and whose icy corpse was found in 1999, without his Kodak that could have testified to his reaching the summit. But also the radio invention made by a then young director Orson Welles who, in 1938, terrorised the whole of America by announcing through CBS microphones the invasion of the earth by aliens.
And, finally, in a brilliant coup de théâtre (although a message informs the audience that the show was first shown – this time for real – four prophetic years in advance) the actress-presenter’s real face is transformed on the screen using a facial recognition programme, changing her identity to assume the fake features and voice of an omniscient and arrogant Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who had not yet invaded Ukraine and become the enemy of the West. He was, however, already the intrusive bearer of the mediatised truth of his power. The Agrupación’s unravelling of the fake backstage communication ends with a miraculous snowfall in the middle of July – the centrepiece of any theatrical fiction – whose fake flakes are surprisingly light and volatile, just like the shuttlecocks used in badminton, evoked at the beginning of the performance. And, as everyone knows, the shuttlecock is uncertain and hesitant, lacking the steady weight of a football.
Agrupación Señor Serrano, The Mountain, Villa Massimo, presented on July 18, 2024 within the Festival “Sempre più fuori”
images: (cover 1-2-3-4-5) Agrupación Señor Serrano, «The Mountain», Accademia Tedesca a Roma, Villa Massimo, © Jordi Soler (6) Agrupación Señor Serrano, Company large ©Jordi Soler
