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.