The other's look
Why don’t you laugh? That’s a comedy, laugh! But we see our image reflected on the mirror and it hurts so much. That’s a fragment from her piece Medea (a la carta), a project thought to make the audience becomes an element of the play beyond its performance. Here, illusion of a live theatre after the curtain’s fall becomes a reality because Esther Freixa has no curtain. She’s between us and challenges us to wondering about our audience role which we play with passivity and, probably, with a comfortable premeditation.
Esther Freixa hasn’t ceased to investigate the scenic language since she graduated from Institut del Teatre de Catalunya. Then, she has travelled across Europe experimenting life and theatre as one thing. She has gone from Berlin to Amsterdam and Barcelona, again. But probably she began earlier when all her questions were born. Medea (a la carta) is a play in four pieces which she combines following her actual feelings. They’re pieces in a constant evolution thanks to her direct experience with audience on stage and beyond when she creates a dialog with them. She has performed in private homes, civic centers and now the Antic Teatre de Barcelona. It’s just for an audience over fifteen people. The mass would dilute the experience because it’s always a refuge.
The duel between desire and fear, between appearance and essence, between convention and nature, is suffering and miserable. It’s an abyss that leads us to live in a prison in which we are victims and tyrants at the same time. Esther used the myth of Medea to make the audience face up all the pain inside. As Ovidi Montllor sang, a greenish-brown liquid that surrounds us and comes from our guts. And indeed, the experience she presents us has no respite. She doesn’t provoke, she challenges you because once you're sitting there you rest alone with your own questions. And loneliness is the only true mirror.
Esther Freixa hasn’t ceased to investigate the scenic language since she graduated from Institut del Teatre de Catalunya. Then, she has travelled across Europe experimenting life and theatre as one thing. She has gone from Berlin to Amsterdam and Barcelona, again. But probably she began earlier when all her questions were born. Medea (a la carta) is a play in four pieces which she combines following her actual feelings. They’re pieces in a constant evolution thanks to her direct experience with audience on stage and beyond when she creates a dialog with them. She has performed in private homes, civic centers and now the Antic Teatre de Barcelona. It’s just for an audience over fifteen people. The mass would dilute the experience because it’s always a refuge.
The duel between desire and fear, between appearance and essence, between convention and nature, is suffering and miserable. It’s an abyss that leads us to live in a prison in which we are victims and tyrants at the same time. Esther used the myth of Medea to make the audience face up all the pain inside. As Ovidi Montllor sang, a greenish-brown liquid that surrounds us and comes from our guts. And indeed, the experience she presents us has no respite. She doesn’t provoke, she challenges you because once you're sitting there you rest alone with your own questions. And loneliness is the only true mirror.
Her silences are areas where the questions emerge, her gestures are elegant in a beautiful minimalist style, and her expressions of pain close to the audience, showing her naked body and soul, sometimes explicit and other red dressed in order to celebrate existence, show that life is waiting in the drawer of society. As usual, life is indifferent there. Esther Freixa gives us air and more.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Video by Antic Teatre BCN