Stage Door News
Stage Door News
Toronto, ON – Acclaimed Argentinian writer and director Mariano Pensotti returns to Luminato Festival, following his much lauded 2014 debut with Cineastas. Pensotti, one of Latin America’s brightest theatre talents, known for his masterful works of inventive stagecraft and piercing narratives, brings El pasado es un animal grotesco (The Past is a Grotesque Animal) to the 2015 festival after highly successful runs in Buenos Aires, Madrid, Norwich, Bern, HAU Berlin, Rotterdam, Zürich, Groningen, Amsterdam, Geneva, Vancouver and more. El pasado es un animal grotesco is on stage at the Bluma Appel Theatre (27 Front St. E.) from June 19 to 21.
“We are thrilled to be welcoming Mariano Pensotti back to Luminato this year,” said Jorn Weisbrodt, Luminato Festival’s Artistic Director. “Our audiences were ignited by the presentation of Cineastas last year and understandably so. Mariano’s work is both intimate and epic, relating to both the emotional, tangible experience of the individual, while situating that experience in a larger social and temporal context – he is one of the most exciting theatre artists in the world. If you want to know where the future of narrative and text driven theatre lies, Mariano Pensotti is the author and director to watch.”
Ten years ago Pensotti began collecting damaged photos thrown away by a nearby photo lab. As his collection grew, he was inspired by the blurred and discarded fragments of the lives of strangers to create a fascinating and ambitious narrative about a group of twenty-somethings in 1999 Buenos Aires, facing love, adulthood and the collapse of Argentina’s economy over the course of a decade.
Four actors perform on an enclosed stage that rotates like a clock, bringing dozens of characters and situations to life in this multi-layered mega fiction that reveals how our recounting of the past shifts each time we remember it, and how easily real life transforms into fiction and back again.
“When I looked back at the damaged photos I’d collected,” comments Pensotti, “I remembered a quote by Balzac, in which he talked about his art as the attempt to “photograph the soul of people and their time.” I decided to take some of the photos and try to recreate the ambitious spirit of these nineteenth-century narrations, telling the stories of four characters of my generation over ten years. I used the damaged images as the basis upon which to create them. The result was a highly narrative, literary text, full of events and quite-impossible-to-represent situations, and at the same time with much freedom. I thought of the idea of “the identity as a narrative construct”: we are what we narrate. And also in how life becomes fiction.
“Aided by the epic effort of four actors that tell and perform a multiple array of stories, the past arises in this play as an animal glimpsed in our dream jungle. An animal that changes shape each time we remember it. A grotesque animal.”
The four central stories begin with a man who wants to be an independent filmmaker but for now he works as an actor in pathetic beer commercials; a woman who steals her father’s savings to go to Paris to live the bohemian life of Nouvelle Vague films and ends up working in a theme park that reproduces the life of Christ; a girl discovering that her father has a parallel family in the countryside and becomes obsessed with them; and a student and amateur writer who receives a box with a severed hand inside that changes his life.
El pasado es un animal grotesco is performed by Javier Lorenzo, Maria Ines Sancerni, Santiago Gobernori, and Laura Paredes. Set and costume design are by Mariana Tirantte, lighting design by Matías Sendón, and music by Diego Vainer. The piece is produced by Grupo Marea and co-produced by Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires, Theaterformen (Hannover), Norwich & Norfolk Festival, and Festival de Otoño de Madrid.
The 10 day Luminato Festival features a number of free and ticketed events. Tickets for El pasado es un animal grotesco start at $19. Tickets can be purchased 24/7 at luminatofestival.com or by calling the Luminato Festival Box Office at 416-368-4849 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday to Friday, or in person The Festival Hub Box Office at David Pecaut Square (55 John St.) from June 19 to 28, from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Ticket savings are available for youth (18 and under)/students, arts workers and groups (10+), or by bundling four or more events in a ticket package. For full ticketing details, dates, times and prices, please visit luminatofestival.com.
Luminato Festival presents
El pasado es un animal grotesco
June 19 at 6:30 p.m.; June 20 at 8:00 p.m.; June 21 at 3:00 p.m.
Bluma Appel Theatre (27 Front St E.)
$19 to $79 plus taxes and service charges
Tickets can be purchased online at luminatofestival.com or by calling 416-368-4849
Written and directed by Mariano Pensotti
Featuring Javier Lorenzo, Maria Ines Sancerni, Santiago Gobernori, and Laura Paredes
Set and costume design by Mariana Tirantte
Lighting design by Matías Sendón
Music by Diego Vainer
Performed in Spanish with English surtitles
For more information visit luminatofestival.com
Twitter: @Luminato
Facebook: Luminato Festival
Instagram: @LuminatoFestival
Hashtag: #Luminato; #ElPasado
2015-05-27
Toronto: Luminato presents Mariano Pensotti's "El pasado es un animal grotesco" June 19-21