RODRIGO GARCÍA

Author, video artist, performer, and director, Garcia lives and wors in Madrid since 1986, where in 1980 he founded  La Carnicería Teatro. He has developed a very personal language for the theatre, one that exists on the margins of the commercial and avant-garde scene. They work with a sense of the space and with unconventional images and have a large number of "loyal followers", as well as "loyal detractors". An atypical creator, he combines elements of the past and of popular culture today in his work. Garcia's greatest strength is that he has circulated with passion the ideas and emotions that trouble a new generation.

Following an exclusive interview with the author, released last July.

gg. Once you said that chaos is not only an aesthetic but rather an ideology you viscerally live. What does it mean? Does this translate in your life outside the stage? rg. I don’t recognize this sentence, was it a long time ago? I can’t remember… but I can try and reflect starting from this on... to start with, neither the chaos nor the order should be an aesthetic, something formal, an a priori in the piece. The form is the materialization of certain ideas and feelings, the form is a consequence and a surprise. It’s not an a priori. Concerning the chaos... I think that there’s a lack of it, there’s lack of chaos in people’s ordinary life... or people are enveloped in a too vulgar chaos, a monster created by ourselves, you know, I’m referring to paying the light bill, the car, the mortgage, creating a family, looking for a place in the supermarket’s parking... and we don’t pay attention to another and deeper chaos, I mean the chaos that’s inside of us, inside of our contradictory feelings and of our need to know …



gg. As you often stated, you developed a real allergy to the show based on the conventional theatre codes. This clearly manifests in a total separation from narration, in the simultaneous use of different communication codes, in the constant attempt to overturn identity and to approach reality in the most direct way. Nevertheless, everything remains within the most conventional theatre format: people buy a ticket, sit in the place assigned and watch an action that happens on the stage. Do you think this is still the most adequate pattern to achieve you purpose?

rg. It’s true, but I’ve always wanted to pervert the theatre language, expand the theatre’s possibilities and this can only been done in the theatre hall, that’s what I want to contaminate. A contaminated theatre is a lively theatre, a theatre that has to defend itself from us.

 gg. One of the most recurring themes in your works is the critic to mass and serial consumption, to the brand and to mass media's languages, which you attack literally “getting your hands dirty”. What do you think about those artists who use the same product of the mass society to dismantle them from the inside? I'm referring, for example, to Matthiew Laurette, with his participations to TV game show and his choice to live only exploiting the logic/propaganda “satisfied or refunded”.

rg. My work talks about education and the difficulty of living together without hurting each other too much. It talks about the need of transcendence that’s inside every human being, my work claims for spirituality… a secular spirituality. And my work also tries to face the public with moments of beauty in the language, within my limitations as a writer. The subject of consumption is something marginal, that I’m leaving more and more aside, but I’ve been given this label, I guess because in this way it’s easier to criticize me at the bar.

gg. Some features of your work, the use of video as an integral part of the scenic discourse, some elements of your aesthetics and the will to provoke reactions in the public, make me think about the Socíetas Raffello Sanzio. Do you know the company? Do you find some contact points between your artistic projects?

rg. There’s something with Romeo… It doesn’t matter what he does, I know he’s going to move me. Concerning the form, they are diametrically opposite! And I’m sure that we often talk about the same thinks but in such a different way that is difficult to realize. For this reason I like him so much. There’s a dialogue with Romeo’s work, a dialogue in the air… you can’t see it… I suppose it’s the same between many others contemporary artists, I don’t know.

gg. Arrojad mis cenizas sobre Micky ends with quite a disturbing sentence projected behind the actors: “guile took the place of wisdom. Now you can't turn back anymore”. A completely negative vision of contemporary society?

rg. The roots of out theatre are in the ancient Greece. So, how can this sentence surprise you? It’s natural to end up the work like this. I mean, by saying: remember that we had a Greece, we had Plato and above all we had cynic philosophers. The sentence you quote could easily come from a cynic. It doesn’t propose a solution, it remains within the borders of the nearly insulting critic, which the cynic liked a lot.
 
gg. How would you define “ugliness”? It seems that the imperfect, the chaotic play a particular and fundamental role in our society, that they are somehow necessary...

rg. I stopped thinking about the theatre scenery in 1993, when I realized that I had been working in Spain since 6 years, I had created more than 10 pieces and that I kept receiving from the Spanish State the same absurd amount of money to produce. For the State I was just another shitty company and I had to bury myself in 60 seat’s theatres forever. This was and continues to be the theatre policy in Spain. And so I said: the little money we receive will be for the staff, for people, we won’t spend a cent for wood or a nail. We did I bought a shovel at Ikea to dig my grave and the idea was clear: every morning we had a walk around the rehearsal place, we brought inside all the garbage we found and that looked interesting. Than appeared - by chance and by Paul McCarthy - the fluids. I started to work with milk, vine, ketchup, mustard, fruit juice... and Carlos arrived and he was able to cast light over these liquids that got the stage dirty. And with these reflections we created landscapes of extraordinary beauty, I mean beauty from shitty materials, from dirtiness and chaos, from products we all have in our houses... We made poetry taking out of their context the simplest things. Than come the actions... I cannot suggest a beautiful action to an actor, I cannot help him finding some harmonious movements, there’s no place for this kind of beauty, there’s already a theatre that looks after it and I don’t criticize it; just think about Robert Wilson, he’s there with his worrying beautiful-beauty. I have to do something different: to show people covered with mud, ‘cause I think that we should create a new Man; to show naked bodies covered with honey and hair, ‘cause I think that exists an eroticism beyond the commercial one. I mean that the ugly once more comes from ideas, it’s not a formal issue.

gg. Your works put in evidence some awful characteristics of mankind, passiveness, hypocrisy, cynicism, the ridiculous of moral judgements and the politically correct... Are these “sins” typical of our age or immanent in the human nature?

rg. Ambition and fight for survival is nothing new. Relationships between master and slave have always existed, they are just changing. We say that slavery has been abolished but this is false, I know about millions of people with a mortgage and children at school and they have been convinced that you have to change the car, the dress and the oven every now and then. I know about two whole continents that are our slaves by now.

gg. Often in your works it seems that there is no escape, the “universe of evil” -as you call it-  seems to be the only truth. Does a virgin space exist, something you regard as precious and unique in human nature that could redeem her? Don't you think that suggesting alternatives -as individual and partial they can be- could be constructive?

rg. Living better to be better, being better to live better. It’s a fundamental PRIVATE MATTER. We have to do the most important thinks alone, without being seen. I believe in a responsibility... a personal, individual responsibility, in a work that everyone –if he wants- can do over himself. To do proposals through a theatre work, I don’t think it’s possible. I don’t have anything good to say, except this, that to be better is a private matter... which then reverberates over society.
 
gg. In the film The age of ignorance, Denys Arcand describes a North American society (with a clear reference to the whole “western” society) where people have completely lost contact with their own life and with who surrounds them, where a mask over their mouth prevents them from the unwilled fluid exchange and where a boat trip on a river water can pass unperceived behind the barrier of a mobile phone or of an iPod. The main character of this film finds in his unbridled imaginations the only escape to this alienating life. Can we say that for you this escape valve is theatre?  And would you call it escape or rather an attempt at action/reaction?

rg. Everyone is responsible for what he does to afford living. I always quarrel about my work in the theatre, but finally when the public sit down and we start playing I’m a little less unhappy. Other people find it creating families. Other buying cars. Others just fucking. Anyway, I’d like to change, turn the page and find these less unhappy moments not in the theatre but in the literature. Maybe with time I’ll only devote myself to this. But I don’t see it as an evasion. On the contrary, they’re all manners to better understand the place, the time we live in and to understand that what’s aside us live and die too.

gg. You theatre is very personal, intimate, it involves and takes out the most visceral emotions. Which kind of dynamic do you create with the actors? I can imagine that it is largely a participative creative work ?

rg. We don’t improvise. I don’t know how to manage other people’s ideas. I use to bring many drawings I do at home to the rehearsal hall. I try to tell the actors the things I imagine in the worst way, I intentionally create gaps in my speech, I express myself as bad as I can, because you cannot tell a complete idea to an intelligent actor, otherwise he’ll keep outside and he can’t do anything but copy what I’m proposing. So the actors look at the shabby drawing and start to materialize it, and here emerge their personality and sensibility, their past, their ideas. A drawing is nothing! Everyone can interpret it as he likes! As a consequence, my work exists for and thanks to the actors. An actor without points in common with me –existential points in common- won’t surely be able to create starting from my proposal; and then my proposal is not valid. Excuse me but this interview is long, I’m tired and we could write 100 pages about this subject.

gg. Body, matter, physicality. These elements often recur in your work, as well as in the work of many other contemporary artists. And after all the attention to the body and its multiple connotations with respect to social and cultural changes is not new at all and was already present in the artistic movements of the '60s and '70s. How do you think the way of experimenting and reflecting over the body has changed during the years, which are its most interesting implications nowadays?

rg. Yesterday we acted in Vienna and during an encounter with the public someone said that a scene I did was similar to the Viennese Actionism, which I know very well as well as the fluxus. In this scene an actor sleeps and others put shit in the white, immaculate bad. The man moves like dreaming, and he gets full of shit. The public said it was unbearable, to see this shit, and that Actionism had already done it. I explained that it was clay, I have no need for a travel mate to roll in shit. But the public is more and more naive and it’s frightening how easily he confuses real and fiction. All that’s performance in my work is subjected to a theatrical structure and to conventions that I cannot nor I want to forget. It’s my game, in this way a create tension, stretching the theatre model to see until which point he can resist. I think that nowadays there’s a more intellectual tendency in approaching the body issue. It’s fine. Then it will finish and another one will come. And then the following. Every poetics seems good to me, because they are contemporary. I even admit false poetics, ‘cause I like to see a thief close up.  
 
gg. Are there Italian companies that you regard as interesting and somehow cognate, considering your recent incursions in our country?

rg. I see very little because it’s always the same story: we come, set up, perform and we go. I don’t want to be impertinent but the impression I have is that in your country you give a great value to form... for form’s sake. And that when it’s time to give this form a content (it should be the opposite, forms generates from contents), you turn too much to the history of the theatre: classical subjects, myths, etc. At the same time the worst lie, the cruellest and the most destructive repeats itself: that in Italy there aren’t good theatre writers. I had the chance to give some workshops (in Volterra...) where actors wrote very well. As a member of the public, I can assure you that I prefer to listen to the improvised words of any 25 years old actor than to stand a revised Shakespeare.  

gg. Going out from one of your shows, a few days ago, I felt the instinct of turning the mobile phone on before leaving the theatre, as I always do. Then I nearly felt ashamed, I put it back in my pocket and hoped nobody had seen me. Is this, more or less, the effect you want to produce on the public?

rg. I repeat: everyone is responsible for his being-in-the-world. I’m happy if I caused you this reaction. But it’s normal. Let’s see: you get out after attending a theatre performance, which is nothing else than an aesthetic and ethic experience. Who would think about turning the telephone on or going to the bar and talk about the piece? The most logical thing to do is to go away and walk alone, until late, until the exhaustion.



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Rodrigo García born 1964 in Argentina and currently living in Spain, is not only "the author of texts that burst like bombs;" he is also a videographer, performer, and director. An atypical artist, he combines in his performances elements from the past and from contemporary popular culture. Together with his company La Carnicería Teatro (literally The Butcher Theatre), Garcia develops a complex and astonishing theatrical language where bodies in motion trace the new rituals of the everyday. Garcia's great strength is in the work's integrity and in its ability to passionately stir the ideas and emotions moving the young generation, who wholeheartedly appreciates his corrosive and intelligent shows. Rodrigo García's productions have been featured, among others, at: Festival Avignon, Teatro per la musica di Roma, Festival de Salamanca, Teatro Nacional de Bretagne, Teatro Nacional de Annecy, Comédie de Valencia, Sitges Festival Nacional, Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, and Chaillot. His works have been translated to English, French, Italian, Finnish, Danish, and Polish.

By Giulia Guerrini