PERVERTIMENTO (THE QUESTION FOR THE THEATER)

_Rough cut_

SYNOPSIS (audiovisual essay)

Seven drama students and their teacher are going to present a play at their drama school in Valencia. Meanwhile, thinking about the new digital reality, someone asks: who is studying theater today?

CONCEPT

On Saturday 9 and Sunday 10 July 2022, ‘Pervertimento y otros gestos para nada’ (Pervertimento and other gestures for nothing) (Sinisterra, 1989), was performed by drama students as part of the 20th Off School Theater Festival, in Valencia, where more than 400 drama students took part. The commission to make a documentary record of this performance was made by the students themselves, before the end of their rehearsals. The proposal to produce a more far-reaching cinematography was made by Alfonso Legaz to this group of students. The cinematographic device defines, among others, the means involved in the audio-visual recording process and is determined by the search for poverty of language as opposed to the dominant aesthetic of technological overload in the production of the language of audiovisual representation. The recording is made with a single camera, single take and dominant direct sound.

Cinematography that does not differentiate between the time in front of the audience and the time of previous processes of actors and actresses. It brings together theatrical representation and cinematography to question the position of theatre in the experience of digital reality, investigating the limitations of cinematography - as a medium of representation - to achieve the status of a document of the stage event or any other event.

Pervertimento, an Italian word with a meaning related to the partial or total inversion of the natural, moral and aesthetic order, is an en-common that links the text that the students try to incarnate, with the cinematography that questions itself as a possibility to account for it. Written by José Sanchis Sinisterra in 1988, in which the playwright questions elements of the dramaturgy linked to consensuses and other conventions of that time, it connects with the critique that Alfonso Legaz’s cinematography poses on the consensuses and mimetic conventions of the documentary film genre in the present historical moment. Theatrical text and cinematographic concept share the space of struggle and growth that implies a critique of the system of representation that each graph constructs: not because of what it presents, but because of how it does it. They do not coincide to confront each other, or for the reception to verify once again that the cinema plunders the theatrical event without giving anything back in return, but rather for both forms of representation to seek progress in their respective fields of production of meaning. If Sinisterra’s text presents a model of “subtraction” on conventional theatricality, proposing - among others - resources such as the reduction of the spectacular device, where the experience becomes more ambiguous, demanding an increase in the active function of the spectator, the cinematographic Pervertimento produced by Alfonso Legaz, works its critical instance from a meditated form of increase, practised on the mimesis that dominates the current construction of the audiovisual document.

Planned augmentation at various productive scales, which affects the architecture of the entire videographic structure and the digital quasi-material base that serves the construction of this structure of meaning. The increase attends to the formal naming of the overflowing amplitude of the meaning of the event (scenic, but not only), perceptible and interpellant in the theatrical scene, and which the signifying consensuses of the digital screens suppress and alienate, homogenising experience and knowledge from the spectacularisation of the strictly visible dimension of any event of human reality. The retinal, presented without further ado as a strong document of reality, suppresses multiple layers of the visual as a field of experience, of knowledge and of human existence - which contains the visible -, removing from the field of interest that which cannot be the object of “objective presentation” with a video camera, forming part of the reductionist discourse of mimesis, common to virtual experience. This cinematography, therefore, questions the so-called “documentary” genre which, by virtue of consensus, passes off fictions as truths, proposing in exchange a practice of the documentary genre that is expanded, reflected on the basis of its scope of representation, and endowed with ethics.