Silver Lion 2015
Venice Biennale
Silver Lion 2015
Venice Biennale
On August 3, 2015, Agrupación Señor Serrano’s work was awarded the Silver Lion for innovation in theatre of the Venice Biennale in a ceremony held at the Palazzo Ca’ Giustinian. We are very proud of the prize and we believe that it is not entirely undeserved. However, not everyone thinks the same. It is fair to bring here the voices of dissent:
“The only real disappointment of the festival was Agrupación Señor Serrano to which this year was awarded the Silver Lion for innovation in theatre (we can’t see the possible reason for that): smart asses and malicious they presented a show in which the chase of American Indians, the hunting of Moby Dick and the capture of Bin Laden were put on the same plane. On stage, some platforms, a series of scale models of Bin Laden’s house in Pakistan, plastic action figures and miniature planes: and a camera amplifying all this on a large screen, as we have already seen in many shows. Where was all this going? I don’t know, from an ideological and political point of view, unless they pretended to trivially show the interweaving of fiction and reality. How original!”
Anna Bandettini, La Repubblica (16/08/2015).
Premiered on 17.04.2010 at Festival TNT, Terrassa.
Performed by three performers, ten tape recorders, a VCR, an electric sandwich maker, and dozens of balloons, Memo explores the mechanisms of memory through a staging supported on dance, sound creation and live video. A particular experience sets our brain in motion and suddenly it is fixed in our mind as memory. At first it seems that the memory is fixed, but the images we try to keep inmutable will constantly change: they are contaminated by new experiences, altered by other elements of similar memories and combed through time.
Memo happens in the Unique Birthday Section of the Memory of an ordinary lady. There, three people are patiently waiting the entrance of the experiences of this person and are responsible to build, maintain and transmit her memories, in a constant struggle to keep them unchanged. And, surely, this struggle against the inexorable expiry of memory, despite knowing it is sterile and doomed to failure, is at the core of what defines us as beings. As usual in the productions of Señor Serrano, Memo is formalized through a mixture of languages and disciplines. A group of three dancers-performers conform the physical body of the piece, through choreography and, above all, scores of movement and action. They bear the main weight of the dramaturgy through the execution of the different scenes, based on the handling of objects, performing choreographies, using multimedia technologies and other physical and visual resources. As it has been recurrent in our trajectory, the capture of live video and the application of real-time image effects is one of the most remarkable tools of the piece, increasing, fractionating, multiplying or distorting what happens on the scene to add meaning to the action. The final result of Memo is that of a visual / dance piece with predominance of plastic, sound and gestural composition.
Director: Àlex Serrano / Dramaturgy: Pau Palacios and Àlex Serrano / Performers – creators: Diego Anido, Susana Gómez, Pau Bachero and Claudia SolWat / Interactive video application: Martí Sánchez-Fibla / Choreography: Claudia SolWat / Sound space and music: Sebastián García Ferro / Lighting design – Costumes: Isabel Franco / Assistant director – Production: Barbara Bloin and Pablo Rosal / Video creation: Josep Maria Marimon / Project consultant: Víctor Molina.
Festival TNT – Terrassa Noves Tendències and Agrupación Señor Serrano.
CoNCA (Consell Nacional de la Cultura i les Arts – Generalitat de Catalunya) and L’Estruch de Sabadell.
Project winner of the Staging project Prize 2010 of the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona.