The Mountain, the Truth & the Paradise

Mal Pelo will be performing at this year’s Festival de Otoño. They will be presenting a double serving of their work after two years. They previously performed Highlands in co-production with the festival itself and after, in 2019, with On Goldberg Variations and in 2017 with Bach . Mal Pelo, under its artistic co-directors Pep Ramis and María Muñoz, is a performance creation group with almost 35 years’ experience. They have been recipients of Medalla de Oro de la Academia de las Artes Escénicas de España and the Premio Ciutat de Palma Margaluz. Shared creation is a distinguishing element of the group. Throughout its career, Mal Pelo has collaborated on projects with artists such as John Berger, Erri de Luca, Cesc Gelabert, Àngels Margarit, Faustin Linyekula, Leonor Leal and Baro d’evel. Throughout the creative process, Pep has had the support of Jordi Casanovas and María Muñoz as directors, August Viladomat as lighting designer and Fanny Thollot as designer of the soundtrack. It is The Mountain, the Truth & the Paradise , a solo that Pep Ramis created and premiered in 2017, supported by texts by Erri de Luca:

I consider it a value to save water, to repair a pair of shoes,

to shut up in time, a cry for help, to ask permission before sitting down,

to feel grateful without remembering why.

This solo piece grew out of the need to construct a personal fiction, to bring the experience of recent work up to date and investigate current artistic interests. Working as a solo artist also involves reviewing the tools of the trade gathered over a long career as a performance creator. The Mountain, the Truth & the Paradise is a poetic world questioning the meaning of divinity and vulgarity, spirituality and ignorance, beauty, and banality. The ability to transform himself into a bare, blank space, and precision of movement and voice are the main aims of the score of this piece, which offers a journey full of variety, feeling and stimulation. As Roberto Frattini wrote: "[it is] another "elliptical" duet, which appears to be the loneliest of solos. Because the same ellipsis, subtraction, absence and waiting that form the backbone of the whole of Mal Pelo’s parable also turn this piece into an eve of something, a sleepless night, the fragile incantation of a presence, a dual solitude. Affirming that "two is not the double, but the opposite of one", Erri de Luca makes it clear that what is not there accompanies us more than any presence".

I consider it a value to know where north is within a room,

to know the name of the wind that is drying the clothes.

I consider the wanderer's journey, the nun's enclosure, a value,

the patience of the condemned, whatever his guilt.

The Mountain, the Truth & the Paradise is a very particular look at the human species and its drifts that do not renounce to humour and sharp irony. Ramis multiplies in precise movements and gestures searching for the zenith. Infra-lightness or ultra-lightness, as Roberto Frattini says Marcel Duchamp says. Ramis's ability to transform himself in a bare white space that also transforms with him, with his body and his voice, given to a changing and exciting one-hour journey, ends up compacting a subtle ceremony of asceticism. Beckettian wanderer, dethroned and wandering Shakespearean king, Quixote or Oedipus, Ramis, much more than a dancer, much more than an actor, lets each part of his body speak with the same emotional and existential density, in search of a beauty in which he can continue to live.

I consider the use of the verb “to love” and the hypothesis of the existence of a creator a value.

Many of these values I have not known.