Y POR QUÉ JOHN CAGE? / Jorge Dutor and Guillem Mont de Palol (ES)

International Guest
performance length: 50 min
the power of the sound of words – insinuating and surfing on the waves of the imagination
no language barrier
In Spanish with English and Czech subtitles.

BREAK A LEG, SHAKE A LEG, BAKE A LEG, BAKE AN EGG, TAKE A LEG, PEG A LAKE, LEAP IN A LAKE, LEAP IN BED , LEAP AHEAD, HEAD FOR A BREAK, MAKE A MATE, TAKE A BITE, BITE A MATE, BITE MY FACE, MAKE A BREAK, TAKE A BREAK, TAKE A NAP!

A brisk, hilarious show by two Spanish performers that works like a time machine or an elixir of youth: it zips you back to your childhood, when speech seemed more like a cacophony of sounds, an infinite, free territory unbound by any definitive meaning or logic. Y POR QUE JOHN CAGE? looks at language without inhibition. It will teach you how to talk – how to talk differently, even in your own language.

It‘s like when a person sits down to his first lessons in a foreign language: speech breaks out of the realm of conveying meaning and just becomes a song, the drumming of the vocal chords against the air, provoking, caressing, or irritating the hearing, resonating inside the skull. And then that person starts to recognize the first words, stringing them together, and because some of them sound similar, it is easy to mix them up. Break a leg becomes shake a leg.

Because the performance plays with language, it also keeps a respectful distance from it. The performers repeat their utterances, cannot express themselves, speak about speaking, reflecting on language by using language. It is as they were too paralyzed by the structure of language and need to help things along with facial expressions, gestures, and movement of the whole body so as to say anything at all, anything with a least a bit of meaning.

The experimental form of this performance makes skillful use of physical and non-verbal theatre styles, layering a verbal element into the whole. Put better: the physical performance element is actually transposed into speech at the level of the vocal chords and the sounds which they emanate. Other movement of the body only serves to illustrate speech, in spite of the fact that the very choice of how we will say something can distort what we want to say.

It is as if the performance aspired to be empirical proof of the evolutional theory, that speech developed out of croaking in the throat. It's not so important what we say or even how we say it, but that we say things and say things and say things... We can't escape the power of speech. It is encoded into our DNA. We are born to speak.

www.anticteatre.com
With the support of: La Porta Barcelona and A ras de suelo, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria