Concept and script: JOAN BAIXAS
Accordeon: MAURICI VILLAVECCHIA
Music selection, compositions, arrangements and scenic director: PACA RODRIGO

In tales and mythology one finds very  diverse kinds of wolves: those capturing children in the woods, those attacking flocks, those being sheep transformed in wild beasts, all these forming an arabesque of symbols and suggestions in a tale made up with texts from the east and the west, with fragments from Elias Canetti, Nazim Hikmet and traditional tales. Motherwolf explains her history with sounds and movements, listening to the voices of the wind and the water, of the animals and the people, like the magician who travels through time with a smile and feathered feet. It is an mischievous afternoon in the woods of Montnegre, a sudden summerstorm, the fire, the shouts of a child attracting the wolf-sheep and …..

With eclecticism and irony Paca Rodrigo and Maurici Vilavecchia play with all kinds of music, from Mozart and traditional songs to their own compositions inspired by jazz and ethnical. Joan Baixas offers a theater-collage of song and narration, of objects and images, tailor-made for Paca Rodrigo, actress and dancer, singer and voice-teacher. With an education in music and dance, Paca Rodrigo worked in research and experimentation with the voice, cooperating in theatrical pieces with various directors, with musicians like Carles Santos, Joan-Albert Amargós and Jordi Sabatés and with dancers like Mal Pelo and Marga Guergué.

Sounnd: Pedro Lucena
Vídeo: Alex Jaleo
Costumes: Alexa Lecomte
Cooperation in lighting: Arantza Flores
Cooperation in direction: Piero Steiner
Coordination: Noèlia Ripollès
Executive Producer: Roser Vilà

Production: Compañía Joan Baixas, 23 Arts, Festival Temporada Alta, with support from the ICIC of the Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya.

Resident company of the Teatre Municipal l’Ateneu de Sant Celoni

then freed by puppets. A visual spectacle with diverse and surprising magical scenes: live painting, glove- and bunraku-puppets. shadow play, animated lights, animation of objects, video and other exquisite effects. SYNOPSIS OF THE STORY: At the beginning the Puppeteer explains that he met Zoé during a puppet show in a psychiatric hospital in Sao Paulo. The girl talked to the puppets by making sounds of jungle-birds. Thereafter, in small scenes we get to know that she was born in the jungle, from where she fled because of a fire, went to the city and made a living in the nights and on the streets, until El Saloio, a drug dealer, put her up in a house with a garden and airconditioning. But, one bad day, the traffic, the heat, the sexual urge, the misunderstandings and other other mishaps, the tragedy unleashed and Saloio was killed with an instrument the girl did neither knew nor how it worked. Zoé became lost in the crowd, naked, smeared with blood and makeup and lived on the street under a heap of newspapers, not speaking to anybody. The police picked her up and took her to the hospital, never connecting her to the murder with the electric knife, In the end Zoé explains that she met the Puppeteer in the show at the hospital and when she saw that that he was the only one able to put the devil in a sack, she dressed up and went along with him. Today they travel the world and are happy.

that can be adapted to the location and the participants. It is a workshop that begins with common questions and ends with personal answers.

The Joan Baixas Company  Smile-Worldmap

What is our vision of the world? What is your vision of the world? We explore the big ideas with humour.

Directed by Joan Baixas in collaboration with Nico Baixas

A Mapamundi (worldmap) is an image of the world with a specific vision of one particular aspect: the territory, the climate, the vegetation, the politics, the economy, or even happiness, health, poverty or death. It is an image of the world that is a snapshot of a global entity. Mapamundis can also be images of globality, such as the Buddhist Mandala, the Maya Calendar, the Gerona Tapestry of Creation, the Australian Songs of the Dreamtime, The Renaissance Theatre of Memory or the more contemporary Google Earth, the Inmarsat satellite network, the Wall Street Stock Exchange screens or just the letters  www.

With the Smile-Worldmap, Joan Baixas aims to create a myriad of worldmaps; personal worldmaps with one vision – humour.  The wonderful, healthy and refreshing vision of His Majesty King Humour, along with his courtiers: Mockery, Grotesque and Laughter.

A day without laughter is like a general without a horse, a day full of laughter is like a horse without a general.

(Chinese proverb from the Chp-Zuhey dynasty)

What is Smile-Worldmap?

Smile-Worldmap is an introductory workshop on Visual Theatre, aimed at students and artists interested in the fusion of the rhetoric and grammar of artistic languages.

It is a course on the practice and analysis of the resources and tools necessary for the creation of scenes with bodies, images and objects and how to present them to the public.

A fundamental part of the workshop is the experience of an open-air public performance.

Project development

Part 1 (virtual): The participants receive information via e-mail, including documentation on previous performances and are invited to begin to generate their own ideas on the subject.

Part 2 (presential): A 25-hour course of collective work, centring on some of the tools of Visual Theatre: the theatrical possibilities of technology, adapting to space, speed of conception and execution, analysis of personal initiatives.

The exercises are not oriented to the acquisition of techniques but are directly focused on the content that one wishes to portray; emotions, messages or experiences that the participants wish to share (always based on a humour, of course).

Through the exercises with the materials and images the participants will create numerous personal visions on the theme of the Worldmap.

Part 3 (presential): Open air public performance, in three acts:

First Act: choreography of objects with the collaboration of all the participants.

Second Act: a variety of short performances with puppets, animated objects, projection of images, kinetic communication, dance, painting and other techniques created and selected by the participants during the course.

Third Act: An enormous canvas painting with the collaboration of all the participants.  The canvas will be hung in the street as the final image of the performance.

Part 4 (virtual): Videos, photos, texts and other materials generated by the course-performance will be put on the web as suggestions for future participants.

Technical aspects

Participants:

Around fifteen people from a range of artistic disciplines (puppetry, dance, plastic arts, acting, music, image technology etc.). A mix of students, professionals and amateurs would also be interesting.

Participants should bring their instruments, cameras, computers, paints etc. Work clothes should be white and able to be painted.

Course admission closes ten days before commencement.

Technical requirements:

A workroom of approximately 50m2 – this could be a classroom, rehearsal room, a workshop, an empty factory unit or a sports hall.

A smaller room for storage of materials and musical instruments.

An outdoor area for the public performance. There should be a point for hanging a canvas of approximately 10m in height.

A sound system in the workroom and in the performance area able to work with different media sources (mp3, CD, labtop etc.).

A number of work tables of indeterminate size.

A simple tool kit and materials for cutting, pasting, sticking and painting paper and wood.

The public performance will be in the hours of daylight so a lighting rig is not required.

Fotos Olot

Fotos Macba

]]> http://www.joanbaixas.com/en/present/mapamundi/feed/ 0 http://www.joanbaixas.com/en/present/tierra-prenada/ http://www.joanbaixas.com/en/present/tierra-prenada/#comments Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:57:04 +0000 admin http://www.joanbaixas.com/?p=1260

TERRA PRENYADA (Pregnant Earth) is a stage performance based on painting. It consists of the realization of various images painted on a large screen which the audience watches by transparency, like a shadow play. The effect, in its simplicity, has a great visual impact, as the author uses his whole body to paint with all the resources of water and light to achieve a fluctuating image with multiple evocations: from a cinema screen to a cave wall.

The material used to paint with is the ash from the books in the library burned in Sarajevo. “In the garden of ashes is born the ancient rose of alchemy”.

The poet Joan Baixas theatricalizes the act of painting. He avoids narration to tackle a new form of dramaturgy based on a pictorial language: splashes, scrawls, light and dark, line and erasure, abstract, symbolic, figurative and geometrical images are the characters in his choreographed drama. The theatre is movement (Meyerhold). The theatre is a space where things enter and exit (Foreman). Pictorial theatre, theatricalized painting.

Terra Preñada lasts just one hour, but is drips so sensuously, splashes so resoundingly, is calligraphy is so musical, that the exercise seduces the public, who leave the theatre with a desire for more.

Backing up the theatrical work with the painting, the performance contains other complementary elements: hand choreography, different types of Mediterranean music, the words of poets and a dialogue with a puppet (or was it an angel?). All of this makes up thematic backdrop built up from the concerns of a contemporary artist: the migrations of the victims of progress, shame at European predominance, the need to accept the inevitable while opening the door to hope, the certainly that Kali, the destroyer of worlds, is also the dispenser of life. The earth is pregnant. The ancient rose of alchemy dies and is reborn at every instant. When things calm down in the darkness of Malkuth they have already taken the road to Kether.

Mvaldik Marlek.

June 1995.

Kultur Gazette. Saint Petersburg, Russia.