La Fura dels Baus: Manes
October 6 - 8, 1997 at the Štvanice Winter Stadium
Creation: La Fura dels Baus, Rafel Vives, Nico Nubiola
Conception and direction: Pera Tantiòá
Assistant direction: Rafel Vives
Music: Big Toxic
Musical collaboration: Miki Espuma, Carlos Padrissa
Lighting Design: Pera Tantiòá, Pedro Pablo Hervas, Ziggy Durand
Stage Design: Nico Nubiola
Stage Production: Nico Nubiola, Guillermo Sánchez, Kai Wehmhorner, I´Ja Mlosch
Costumes: Mercé Crespo, Tete Company
Assistant to costume design: Yolanda Berdier
Production Design and Direction: Andreu Polo
Production: Fernando Guiard, Esther Badía
Assistant of production: Jeroni Pagán
Tour Staff Collaboration:
Artistic coordination: Pera Tantiòá
Assistant direction: Rafel Vives
Performing: Younes Bachir "Lafritz", Vanessa Dinger, Milena Biancospino, Agatha Cornez, Carles Fígols, Victor Goñi, Pepa Sabaté
Music and audio technician: Germán Rodriguez
Coordinator technician: Fernando Guiard
Road manager: Susana Cuñado
Lighting technician: Ziggy Durand, Pedro Pablo Hervas
Stage technicians: Pere Ferrer, Miguel Angel García
La Fura dels Baus is a company in agreement with Departament de Cultura of the Generalitat de Catalunya and Tecla Sala - Ajuntament de l´Hospitalet de Llobregat.
Performance was made in the collaboration of Copec, Iberia and Ruhrfestpiele Recklinghausen Europisches Festival
Thanks to the firm Telefónica S. A.
Performances in the Archa Theatre were made under the support of Ministry of Culture of Czech Republic, 14, FAN, Labyrint revue, Radio 1, Radio Limonádový Joe, Radio Rokko.
La Fura dels Baus
The present impossibility of a unitary reality has become tangible in the contemporary stage as the borders between genres fade, a new creator status appears, and technology and the media environment are increasingly incorporated.
La Fura dels Baus works in this plural-artistic field creating, coordinating and catalyzing events that may be shown in different formats (theatre, opera, Olympic ceremonies, advertising productions or hybrid forms such as planetary rave parties), and they do it expanding their rubbing method towards other creators, starting from a fruitful mutual contamination principle.
This expansion has also meant a diversification/multiplication of projects retaining the heritage of collective aesthetics, gestated during their seventeen year long collective biography. This diversification has allowed La Fura dels Baus to simultaneously work in as constellation of events, in a structural dynamism within a group mitosis process.
La Fura dels Baus challenges contemporary complexity in an internal moment of real creative ferment.
Message of "Manes"
The pen (the actor and his environment)
When La Fura dels Baus produces a new show, one of the first creative axes is the building of the environment. In Manes, it is a neutral space where beauty shows itself as a thin veil on the sinister. Thus the actors constitute a physical part of the space in which they move, and, in turn, make the space turn into a dream part, an appendage to these actors. A pen where eggs stand up and hens fly.
The shadows (the lighting)
A connecting thread that shows and hides. Distant echo of the ushers of a second-rate cinema, leading the audience in a useless journey towards a seat that does not exist. All the lighting is mobile, wandering, shifting. Two autonomous lighting towers, actors at the same time, manipulated in view of the audience.
The implements (properties)
In the sober scenic space, the properties remind us of a post-war landscape. A return to human traction, or even farther, to animal traction, in which the machine has stopped working. A sensual relationship born from the tragic clash between the skin of the actor and the skin of the artifact.
The din (the music)
A huge stethoscope has taken over the space, allowing us to feel the beat of the play. Music is not an illustration, but rather a cadence in which body rhythms bring us closer to the physiology of the show. An acid journey to the right hemisphere of the brain.
The cackling (the text)
Character divided by common languages. Polyphonic Babel of non-communication in which the text acquires the status of gesture rather than discourse. It is a cackling in which it does not matter what is said, but what is not said.
The dramatics
It is based on a grammar of simultaneity and no continuity. Zapping of emotions and sensations. A historical dramatization, in which the plot is the Here and Now. A series of scenes set against each other in which different worlds share space and time. A Gothic tale that attends, unmoved, the clash of several private scenes, always caught unawares by an indiscreet light.
Other birds (the audience)
The Manes audience do not know they are actors as well. They become an element of this system-monster that moves and progresses in an unpredictable way towards an end that is only apparent. Thus the audience becomes observer and observed at the same time. Manes: public show of private facts.
Farm animals
A personal invitation to the dream world, where cocks, fed up with waiting for sunrise, have turned into chickens. A tale in which men are chickens and chickens are men, in which fear has an educational value, logic destroys our imagination and security, a few grains of corn, has become an absolute value in our lives.
"Manes is not an ideology. There is no truth to be found. If there is no original truth, what does Manes tell us? Nothing. Manes builds and destroys, searches and does not find, asks questions without knowing the answers, does not solve problems, creates them. It cries laughing and laughs despairingly. Manes is a multitude of emotions communicated, dizzily, by means of several stories that cross each other, rub, and in costume, play disorganization to make incomprehensible what seems logical, as in a dream. Do we make invisible what becomes inexplicable for us? Here is a legitimate question, with no answer: a Manes-question."
Accidents Polipoétics
La Fura dels Baus: Manes(programme from the performance)
Poster of Performance