De Mortibus, requiem for Samuel Beckett by Mapa Teatro, brings to the stage many of the formal and conceptual materials of contemporary artistic creation. It feeds just as much from dramaturgical approaches as from the visual arts: painting, sculpture and performance art. The complexity of this work is partakes in the multidisciplinary dimension of contemporary art. It tends to blur the boundaries between different artistic categories to integrate sight, sound, emotion and their extensions: space, real-time and memory. Heidi and Rolf go beyond "representing" a literary and theatrical narrative. They aim to "work" the space: to define it through the lines drawn by the virtual choreography of voices, by the movements of the actors, by the seldom objects that stand out as constellations on the naked stage. De Mortibus compromises the very essence of art. It is a reference that helps us understand the scale of contemporary creation. It shows that visual creation is not confined to galleries and museums.
Carolina Ponce de León, El Tiempo, March 1990.
De Mortibus.
Score.
A piece for four actors.
Not five anymore, or six, or seven as before.
A grey space, like any floor, any wall, any head or sky in the world.
In some theatre.
Like a hole: the earth is full of holes. Like memory. Grey time, like any given time in eternity, a long time ago, right now, in some time.
At the time of a performance. Fine rain as if launched from a watering can.
Real and imaginary space and time, at the end of the day, everything is an illusion.
Four grey figures [M1,M2,M3,M4] pale shadows of one same character: M.
M for Malone, Macmann,M for Malone, Macmann, Mag, Mady, May, Mercier, Moll, Molloy, Moran… with their echos: solos, duets, trio and quartets. Identical, but not similar.
Like stones or chimeras. Undetermined ages: too old for young bodies, too young for adult actors. Sometimes ashes sometimes fire.
Bodies moving forward, backward, up and down as needed. Walking: sometimes slow, sometimes lame and painful, sometimes fast.
Gray faces, like those of collapsed clowns, no nose.
White, monotone voices.
Fragments of conversations. Long silences interrupted by words and music.
Intervals of other requiem: Arbos to the memory of Andrej Tarkowskij.
Stabat Mater.
Fresh Start.
Frates Canto to the memory of Benjamin Britten De Arvo Pärt.
Leaden light.
Darkness.
Curtain.
Silence nobody moves.
