Kulunka Teatro lands, one more year, at the Grec Barcelona to bring back one of its most acclaimed works: André y Dorine. This is the first of the works that the Teatre Condal hosts from the trilogy that the company will present in the coming weeks: Solitudes and Forever. With these three scheduled shows, the production company Focus wants to bring us closer to the creative and artistic universe of this Basque company that offers theater with masks and without words.
André y Dorine is a show that tells us the love story of a couple that travels from the present to the past. The present places us in the home of two elderly people who live with the shadow of an incipient disease: Alzheimer's; the past shows us how that love story between a cellist and a writer was forged in the 70s.
Without a single word, the show immerses us in a story full of rhythm, experiences, and expressiveness through the use of masks. We do not see the actors' faces, we do not hear text, but we find ourselves immersed in an emotional journey where love occupies everything.
Kulunka Teatro returns with one of its most awarded works
Garbiñe Insausti, José Dault, Iñaki Rikarte, Rolando San Marín, and Edu Cármaco are the playwrights of this gestural theater proposal, which features mask design by Garbiñe Insausti.
Since André y Dorine premiered in October 2010, it has won a large number of awards and recognitions such as the Award for Excellence from the International Art Awards Foundation of New York (2022) or the Award for Best Dramaturgy at the Be Festival of Birmingham 2011, among others. It is the first work created by the Kulunka Teatro company, which was founded in Hernani in 2010 with Garbiñe Insausti and José Dault, two actors trained at the Royal Higher School of Dramatic Art in Madrid.
The objective of the company's creation was to find other scenic languages that were accessible to all types of audiences and that, furthermore, were committed to reality. Throughout its trajectory, the company has ended up becoming one of the most acclaimed, both nationally and internationally; in fact, they have performed in more than 30 countries around the world and have accumulated 1000 performances.
Love as a universal language
Kulunka Teatro presents a play that speaks of love at its peak. Of love and tenderness. And it does so without speaking, without facial expression; solely with an exquisite selection of scenes and experiences that narrate the message they want to convey. The masks created by Garbiñe Insaust contain all the expressiveness the play needs: masks that are capable of reflecting drama, surprise, comedy, and even irony.
André and Dorine is a love story that invites us to travel to the past. With subtle changes of wig and costume, we meet the young couple when they first met, when they fell in love, when they decided to unite their lives. But we also see them now, in the present, the couple established in old age and at the beginning of the mind's decline. At first, we only see some details, forgetful gestures, small quirks, absent-mindedness that can be attributed to age.
But then, the illness appears in a very specific scene that encompasses its horror: Dorine, sitting in her armchair with the cello in hand, wants to start playing a piece, but forgets how to do it; she doesn't know what to do with her hands, she doesn't remember how to rub the instrument to produce music. And terror invades her body. Alzheimer's has arrived.
The tragicomedy of life
André, the husband, begins to see this monster that is invading his wife, so he uses the only weapon he has: love. Through affection, tenderness, and patience, a lot of patience, he becomes the caregiver of this woman who is beginning to fade from the world. And, in the scenes of care, we find another of the ingredients that make this play so beautiful: humor. Because life is tragedy, but it is also comedy; we live in a tragicomedy in which we laugh, cry, hug, and shout at each other. And all of that we see on stage, with some very subtle, but very well-crafted humorous moments that contribute to explaining the plot.
This is the case of the sock scene: Dorine doesn't remember how to wear socks and ends up putting them on her hands, like gloves. Here, humor is very well worked, as it creates an absurd, funny, and surreal moment, as if Dorine had become a child and didn't quite know how this living thing works. But we quickly move from humor to tragedy because the illness hurts and, above all, it hurts those who accompany. In fact, this is one of the most interesting contributions of the work, and it is that not only is the decline of the patient shown to us, but the suffering of the caregiver is very well outlined. She, in the end, is fading from the world and her absent mind protects her from pain and suffering; but he is there, at the foot of the cannon, being a silent witness to the death of his wife.
The sock scene evolves into a brutally painful scene in which André, desperate and fed up, ends up pushing Dorine. Because he doesn't know what to do, he doesn't know how to care for her without breaking down, he doesn't know how to fight against this disease that is ravaging his life. Showing that duality of the caregiver, those feelings that move between love and weariness, is one of the great contributions of the proposal.
A gestural, not textual, dramaturgy
In the hour and a half that the show lasts, not a single word is spoken. But it's not necessary. We are faced with a proposal that has a very well-stitched dramaturgy, which allows us to know a love story from beginning to end, but in which there is no textual script. All the weight of the dramaturgy falls on the brilliant selection of scenes: they present us with the life of this couple through brief and concise scenes that help to draw their story. The tempos are very well worked, as the moments of greatest dramatic intensity are lowered with more gentle moments, in which youth and falling in love make the audience smile.
Despite talking about something as painful as illness, the details we see on stage are simple, subtle. At no point do they revel in the most intense emotions: neither in drama nor in comedy. A natural work is presented. One of the most significant dramatic resources that help, precisely, to better express emotions is the direct gaze at the audience. The actors, with their masks on, look directly at us, they challenge us, so that moment of sadness, strangeness or humor reaches us better. And they succeed with flying colors.
The scene of the first romantic encounter between the couple is one of the most charming of the play because, without a word, we can sense the shyness of both characters, those first moments of falling in love in which the body speaks everything you keep silent. Sex scenes are very complicated in theater: they are either too explicit or too short. But in André y Dorine, a fun and tender resource is chosen, a resource that refers to that childish and childlike part that is shown when love strikes our lives.
But the most captivating and emotional scene is found in the moment of the embrace, the moment of farewell. Alzheimer's is a disease that erases you from the world, that transforms you into someone different, that distances you from your loved ones. But with that gesture of the embrace, a reunion is communicated to us: with her partner, but also with herself. It is a song to life and love, but also to the resignation that everything ends. And, to say goodbye, there is nothing better than doing it with a big hug.
André y Dorine is a work that moves between beauty, poetry and humanity. With actors dressed in very well-designed masks and without uttering a word, a beautiful, simple and very tender story is told in which love occupies everything.