“This work brings together fragments of works that I made but that I perceive as a new creation. In fact I think that the originals were made to finally be able to make this one”says Federico León, author and director of “The Times”, which brings together fragments of all his plays previous ones: “Cachetazo de campo” (1997); “Fifteen Hundred Meters Above Jack Level” (1999); “The Adolescent” (2003); “Me in the future” (2009); “The multitudes” (2012), “The ideas” (2015) and “I write. You draw” (2019).
In “The Times” the viewer witnesses a collection of theatrical fragments that re-enact scenes already seen such as the shoe war that hits a motorcycle helmet, a ping-pong table that transforms into a giant computer, adolescent indoctrination techniques , invented sports practices, an actress who can’t stop crying or a cabin of silence, among many others. It has performances of Jimena Anganuzzi, Ignacio Rogers, Miguel Ángel Olivera, Emanuel Torres, Federico León, Gastón Frías, Daniel Cosentino, Pablo Brignoccoli, among others. It can be seen at the Teatro Sarmiento from Wednesday to Sunday at 8pm. We dialogue with León.
Journalist: How are the themes and procedures of different works deployed in one?
Federico León: For some time I had been working with the idea of a fragment or miniature, that one could enter and see a piece of theater, a moment of performance. Those are beginning moments, there is something elliptical in the work. The intention was to bring together in one work several pieces of all the works I did. I have always worked with very different people, children, older people, very dissimilar groups are put together, very different instruments that can participate in the same melody.
Q: What is it like to combine them so many years later? What is there that I hadn’t detected?
FL: It is bringing together different times, the first is from 1997 and the last from 2019, that coexistence generates relationships, there are elements that are repeated and I recognize that they appeared in a weaker or smaller way in some works while in other works the volume increased or increased. From topics to procedures.
Q: What are the themes that obsess you and that you are always returning to?
FL: Time. It appears in all the works, in “Me in the future” there was an obsession with observing themselves looking at records, they are children who film themselves on an outing, then as young people they observe that filming and film themselves, and as old people they film themselves looking at that chain. In the same shot one sees a chain of films at the same time. The idea of this work is that all these times coexist in this scenic present. Another issue is what is repeated, what returns, what is recovered. There is a hyper-controlled chaos, one sees something that seems like it can never be repeated, like the crying of two actresses or in “Jack” there was a bathtub that always overflowed the same way, certain sports, little balls that have to float and go into a glass , a very fragile material that seems like it will not be repeatable and yet can be repeated. Also the invisible overproduction, the number of elements that one does not necessarily have to see but that are fundamental for the work to work.
Q: Are the actors the same as then? Do they all coexist on stage?
FL: The actors are the original ones who worked on the works, the most emblematic case is that of Ignacio Roger whom I met when I was 8 years old, that of “Jack” which was made in 1999 and in 2003 we worked together again on “The Adolescent”. , he was already 15 years old and today he is 36. There is a journey that one sees in his body that also happens with other actors. The costumes try to reproduce the original and it is also a work that brings together fragments of sets, lighting settings, and music, and this coexistence of times so distant from each other is precisely the point of the work.
Q: What is the question about representation?
FL: The work stages the form of memory, it is not so important for me to reproduce exactly such a scene from such a play but rather what I have left and remember, that is why I think that this is a moment of performance of such a play, or a moment of action from another. As happens in dreams, in this coming together layers of time, of works, and a work within another work begin to overlap, works that look at each other.
Q: Is the work a kind of flow from the unconscious structured in the code of dreams?
FL: When you dream and wake up you remember that it was mom’s house and at the same time a train station and at the same time a school, this idea that it is not one thing or the other but one thing and the other. The play works along those lines, the actress from “Cachetazo de campo” in the set of “Yo en elfutur” looking at a record of the play “El Adolescente”. New results and images appear in this overlay. Sometimes I think that the original works were made for this work and underlying the idea of what came first. They are reversals, the fragments together create a new version of each of the works.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
