In the lower left corner of the screen, Tokyo sneaks in, the reflection of its illuminated skyscrapers like a grid of light. Àlex Ollé and his team have been locked up for 14 days, each in their own quadrilateral/apartment; not even the hallway allows them to walk off the quarantine. Boxed in their screens, instructing the stage managers who, through two cameras in the theater, are setting up the premiere of their Carmen which, he says, "has turned into a chess game" due to the rigid regulations in the Japanese country. A Carmen without street tumult or passionate touches, hardly conceivable, "the characters must be four meters apart, they touch with vinyl gloves…". Not even the most futuristic fables of that Fura of the 90s imagined such an improbable reality. Àlex Ollé (Barcelona, 1960), stage director, one of the six founders and artistic directors of La Fura dels Baus in 1979, 40 years making theater, 20 directing and producing opera. "What we did in La Fura, beyond theater, was total spectacle: we were a group of creators continuously contaminating each other; but we didn't know that Wagner had already spoken of this total spectacle, and of course, we ended up doing opera."
Tomorrow marks the end of his official quarantine in Japan. Between scenes of Carmen, Ollé has worked on other projects, talks facetime with his children and family around the world, attends a premiere via streaming or, if things got urgent, he could even practice sex: let's not be simpletons, we've seen it in movies and it's perfectly normal.
But Ollé, cloistered, has lost the temporal dimension of what is happening; he asks me if I have time and begins to show me set designs from some of his previous works and from La bohème which premieres tomorrow, Monday, at El Liceu and constitutes his first contribution as resident artist or artistic advisor at Barcelona's grand theater and, suddenly, "We only have five minutes left!". Other screens await him, other quadrilaterals or worlds. We rush the interview.
Giacomo Puccini's La bohème, which premiered in 1896, based on Henri Murger's naturalist, verist serial novel, refers us to the emergence of artistic avant-gardes (dreams, fantasy, abstraction, futurism...) that accompanied us until the late XX century, revisited again and again. The version that Àlex Ollé recreates of Puccini's opera is absolutely faithful to the libretto; he barely allows himself, out of necessity, to contextualize the scene in the present time. Could it be that we have returned to hyperrealism, something that seems to be happening in literature? "Not necessarily, diversity is needed, as in cinema, as in plastic arts. It happens that in this opera the protagonist is everyday life, and Puccini is an excellent playwright, the great exponent of musical theater that has inspired cinema so much: one only needs to listen to the music. And something so excellent, so well told, cannot be betrayed: it would be a colossal mistake. Each project must be approached from the perspective of its creators, and if the language used is abstract, it is easy to bring it to your own, as happens with other operas by the same author that I have adapted, for example, Turandot. But this one, no; it would be a great stupidity to modernize this opera."
"Something so excellent, so well told, cannot be betrayed: it would be a colossal mistake. Each project must be approached from the perspective of its creators"The title refers to a group of young creators, fragile, unstable, hungry, nomadic, irreverent, and from it arises the term "bohemia", which links artists with the native tribes of this Czech region who were none other than citizens of Gypsy ethnicity, wandering through Europe, equally unstable and indifferent to the majority social convention. A linguistic translation that would now be absolutely unfeasible due to being incorrect. Urban artists, where would they be today? Where does Ollé place them? "In thebanlieu, the peripheral suburbs of any city in the world; in Barcelona, beyond L'Hospitalet or El Bon Pastor. There, in urgency, is where true art emerges, much more authentic than that other art exhibited for the bourgeoisie on Paseo de Gràcia or Consell de Cent.And the protagonist, when she dies, is no longer infected with tuberculosis, but by the effects of chemotherapy, of course, and that's how the group becomes aware of death, and then their youth ends.Visually it is very spectacular. We premiered it in 2016 at the Teatro Regio in Turin, the same stage where Puccini had presented it for the first time 120 years earlier, and it was a huge success; wherever we have taken it, the critics have been very complimentary."
"No, it's not that a new realism is triumphing, but it is essential that art speaks of the present. I personally am tired of modern versions of Shakespeare, of Beckett. We in theater have always talked about what is happening in the present, why not create contemporary opera also about what is happening?"
Collective present. "In La Fura, which was a magnificent school of collective work, we always said: There is no creation without friction. That is, quite the opposite of (puts on a cheesy voice) look, we're going to do a Hamlet and you're going to create a set design like this and like that, and... I'm fed up! We have to produce works that speak to us of the present. In the end, those of us who have done it, and even if the local critics haven't understood us, are the ones who have gone out into the world. Pradissa, Bieito, myself... The rest have stayed here doing ultra-modern versions of the classics."
--- Ollé, this generation of post-millennial young people and adolescents, whom we have locked up and placed on the edge of the abyss, because they are nothing without freedom and selfhood, do they still have hunger like those bohemians?
--- I don't know, I'm not a thinker, but why not create around it? Our generation was very privileged, we received freedom all at once when it is most needed, which is at that age; then came years of subsidies and that was another thing. What young people are experiencing today is also a catalyst that will generate a change, which I have no idea where it is going. Even if it were only the change in the forms of communication, that way of immediately reaching everyone, which is an advantage for them, already means that their life will be different. And how do you manage all this overdose of confinement and screens, like the one we are experiencing these days here in Tokyo? Well, while for us it is cured with an immersion in nature, nobody knows where these rats will come out, who largely do not know or appreciate nature; these rats who will no longer be able to swim in the Mediterranean because it will be too polluted. The rats are coming out of the hole and we have to talk about them, in my operas I always talk about today towards the future.
"What young people are experiencing today is also a catalyst that will generate change, which I have no idea where it's going"There lies the future, whether we like it or not, whether we want to understand it or not. And what Ollé answers sounds like a new project. And that's what I'm thinking of asking him.when he drops the "We only have five minutes left! I've arranged to connect with my kids, who are around, who we never get to see, and this time I promised (22 and 28 years old)".
We took advantage of those minutes to talk about his contribution as artist-in-residence or artistic advisor of the Liceu, for the next four years, to a project that its new artistic director, Víctor García de Gomar, wants to lead towards the model of "center of the arts" or "liquid theater, from which infinite questions must emerge," from the friction of some disciplines with others: the total spectacle that Ollé mentioned, the total artist that the avant-gardists declared at the beginning of the 20th century.
--- What intention does a furero bring to the gran teatre?
--- I will contribute the vision of a stage creator, my vision as a theater and opera director. The understanding among the four of us at the table (García de Gomar; the musical director, Joan Pons; the general director, Valentí Oviedo, and himself as resident) is excellent. First, we want to create new talent, discover new talent, for which we have already begun to lay the groundwork with proposals such as (Òh!)pera, commissioning half-hour micro-operas from four new librettists, stage directors, composers. I have chosen four directors who will work with Barcelona's design schools, so that they can experiment with group creation, permeable to the different artistic facets that occur in a spectacle such as opera. We will produce new contemporary operas. The second objective is to educate children, and also adolescents and people between 30 and 40 years old, who are very disaffected with this genre. And finally, to broaden the tastes of the audience that is already regular. Overall, it is a work that has been going on for some time, under the artistic direction of Joan Matabosch, and the aim is to take it further.
Well, I'll let you move on, good morning and good night in the far east.