DOUBLE INFINITE. The Bluebird Call

Double helpings of Mal Pelo at this year’s Festival de Otoño, two years after its performance of Highlands in co-production with the festival itself and its performances of On Goldberg Variationsin 2019 and Bachin 2017. The company, based in Girona and run for almost 35 years by Mallorca-native Pep Ramis and Valencia-native María Muñoz, was awarded the Gold Medal of the Academia de las Artes Escénicas de España and the Ciutat de Palma Margaluz Award in 2022. These awards come in addition to everything they have achieved over the decades, either alone or in collaboration with leading figures of thought and creation such as John Berger, Erri de Luca, Cesc Gelabert, Àngels Margarit, Faustin Linyekula, Leonor Leal and Baro d’evel. After Pep Ramis’s solo performance The Mountain, the Truth & the Paradise , in Madrid we are to experience the premiere of their latest offering: Double Infinite. The Bluebird Call,a duet in which the two founders of Mal Pelo are going to dance again together and alone on stage after a long time.

Muñoz and Ramis, without a doubt, speak of this production one of those that have marked their long career as turning point, in which they come together on stage to delve into and continue on the path to discover new realms of language, ideas about performance and dramatic composition. Double Infinite is the logical follow-on from Quarere (1989), L'animal a l'esquena (2001) and El quinto invierno (2015). It is a piece that adds to further strengthen the building of their poetics, from the fragility, simplicity and love for the craft, which three and a half decades later continues to raise questions.

"The project,” they explain, “contemplates the need to imagine and pursue impossible realities, to build a fiction that shows the importance of inventing the future, of projecting it beyond the foreseeable. The search for alternatives to the reality that surrounds us is born from the urgency to dissolve what we perceive as real and give ourselves the possibility of rebelling against what seems immovable, against the structures that build us as individuals and society. The body is a tool with which we can design and write new works of fiction to make us think and to dislocate us from reality. Body and movement contain internal codes that move away from structured and sequential ideas. We are talking about codes that are infinitely more naked, vertiginous and revealing of the impulses of our habitat, of our world".

The body’s needs and the need to imagine another future. These are burning questions that push us to quote Merleau-Ponty, who stated that "the body is the centre of the world of experience” and Mark Fisher, who eloquently wrote on the urgency of continuing to seek the new for our culture to survive in the face of capitalist ruin: “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.” Among the starting points for the creation of this performance, which premiered at the Grec Festival in Barcelona this year, are familiar voices close to Mal Pelo: John Berger in La apariencia de las cosas and Erri de Luca in Tres caballos.

In an almost bare space, its mutability is manifested through lighting, sound and objects in a meticulous work on detail, gesture precision, rhythm and movement intensity. Two people close to sixty years old come together with the will to wonder about what remains to be imagined and propose a sensitive journey through their doubts on our lives, our relationships and our place. Time on stage is manipulable, ductile and anachronistic. Body and word too.