Show designed for a non-theatrical space where a large video can be projected on a white wall or on a projection screen.
The audience will be able to arrange themselves freely: sitting on the floor or on cushions, standing, moving freely, considering the option of benches that can move during the performance.
Show for 3/4 performers and two human puppets.
Total duration between 50 and 60 minutes.
Text language adaptable according to the country.
Option to project the video several times a day.
Option to do the performance 3 times a day maximum, always with a minimum break of X minutes between performances.
Possibility of using a local figuration group.
Author's intention
The power that death emanates continues to stir our creativity and forces us to lay infinite connection cables with the afterlife.
The medieval dance of death, as a practice, ritual and topic, gives us a poetically pertinent image of death and the justice it entails: we will all end up coming face to face with it; The fatal hour arrives, infallibly, for each one...
Revisiting the dance of death in the 21st century, in the full turbulence of a world thrown towards its terminal chaos by a thousand social, digital and spiritual revolutions is a deliberate anachronism, almost a meditation.
After so many versions, visitations and revivals of the format, our Totentanz is nothing more than an invitation to celebrate the fragility of life and meditate on its loss of value. Together we have built a world in which death is more normalized, closer than ever. At the same time, it has never seemed so far away, so remote and incomprehensible. The current contempt for the values of life is directly proportional to the generalized inability to interpret, dance, and officiate death as a mystery.
In Totentanz we begin by involving the audience in a spiritualism session, with bodies that seem to speak to us from the last thresholds of the world and from there begins a journey that brings into conflict the eternal dilemma that separates life from death.
Assuming death is a labyrinthine and dark path. Our imagination, always clumsy and infinite, always tries to get ahead in the race for the meaning of life. And it is lost.
Because life is impatient, but death knows how to wait. Here death appears to us allegorically embodied by two inert and bony bodies. It seems that they have more clues about the afterlife, as if they visit it often. Or maybe they are just two puppets, two figures frozen under the endless winter of Mother Death. As if we found ourselves in a passage of terror, we begin to realize that every ritual is a pure product of fear; that we invoke the afterlife because from "here" we cannot bear not knowing the place we are going to.
Losing consciousness, shaking our bodies, getting lost in the darkness of the senses and succumbing to the trance of music and dance leads us to catharsis, and from that state even the bitter bite of nothingness enters easier.
More than 5 centuries later, the dance of death once again sets the tone among us, to ask us where we are going, who we are and what this place we inhabit means before death takes us by the hand to make us dance with it.
Marcos Morau