La Plaza

Theatre becomes town square, town square becomes theatre. This is La Plaza, the square in any city or any neighbourhood around which the play by the famous Catalan collective El Conde de Torrefiel, applauded in festivals throughout Europe, takes place. Founded in Barcelona in 2010 by Pablo Gisbert and Tanya Beyeler, both of whom had worked in Marcos Morau’s La Veronal company, in the space of ten years El Conde de Torrefiel has become established as one of the leading voices in the renewal of European theatre, mingling choreography, the plastic arts, drama.

On the stage/agorà, Pablo Gisbert and Tanya Beyeler evoke fragments in the lives of a faceless crowd (riders, soldiers, tourists, young people, veiled women, couples, filmmakers), random situations captured as routine when the unexpected suddenly bursts in, events rife with anguish and a violence ready to explode, tracing the outline of our world in conflict. The actions flow as a sequence of tableaux vivants, punctuated by commentary projected against the backdrop of a screen, a stream of consciousness that accompanies them and are addressed to the audience. In a subtle and bewildering overlapping of roles, the audience becomes both an “actor” in the ideal urban journey of a spectator leaving the theatre to go home, and “witness” to the events playing out on the stage.

La Plaza is a “play-landscape” (in the definition of Michel Vinaver), the way in which Pablo Gisbert and Tanya Beyeler respond to the urgency of contending with one’s own time, taking their gaze out of the theatre into the square where life happens. “Civilisation advances frenetically, while reality paradoxically becomes more and more subjective, emotional and impenetrable”.