Argentine theater director Mariano Pensotti, in a theater in Buenos Aires.E. Fernandez
Argentinian playwright and theater director Mariano Pensotti (Buenos Aires, 49 years old) has always preferred acting to watching. Lay the body. Pensotti recalls that his parents sent him to acting classes as a child “because he was very shy,” and he continued to perform until his twenties. “I was pretty bad at acting, luckily I found that out pretty quickly,” he jokes. It was around this time that he began writing and directing his own plays, still believing that the theater “would be an intense, multi-summer romance” rather than the enduring relationship that has already spawned 25 plays and which The Doors has opened to festivals around the world. In an interview with EL PAÍS after the screening of his trilogy on theater audiences in Buenos Aires, Athens and Brussels (El Público, The Audience and Le public / Het Publiek), he reflects on the connection between the people of Buenos Aires and the performance art and the devastation caused by the pandemic. “I love seeing the public. I wonder who they are,” says Pensotti, before admitting that he attends almost all performances of his plays and observes those who are in the seats when the curtain rises.
Questions. What is the relationship between the Porteños and the theater?
Answer. Very intensive.
P Because what is this?
R. I think it has to do with many things. On the one hand, Buenos Aires is a great representation of something else. Here the people act as if they were European exiles instead of Latin Americans. There are those who are already the fourth generation of immigrants but continue to speak mythically of their origins; we have a President who went so far as to say that in South America we are all descendants of Europeans without regard to our roots. This depiction of otherness explains much about the Porteños’ relationship to the theatre. I think that the everyday, that you send your sons and daughters to study theater for whatever reason and after the theater in Argentina has been able to prove its resilience against absolutely everything, dictatorships and economic crises, also has an influence.
P. You just got through a pandemic. What impact did it have on theatre?
R. The pandemic has been very tough because there haven’t been many support networks here for those of us who do theatre. For us, that is for the Marea Group, it was super complicated because we often do co-productions with foreign festivals and theatre, festivals and travel were the combination of everything that was not possible. We spent two years with enormous uncertainty that still exists. The number of closed independent spaces is enormous, and this is a loss that will take a long time to rebuild.
P. During the pandemic, the theater tried to adapt to virtuality and filmed plays were shown. How do you see these experiences?
R. On the one hand, theater needs life because it has to share a space for a while and this reality makes every performance unique and different every night. The audience changes what is happening on stage with their presence and their reactions. When they laugh, when they cough, when they get up and leave, it’s impossible not to be touched. The spectators then complete the work with meaning because its ephemerality makes it much more alive and fragile than cinema, which has the opposite claim of capturing time and preserving the experience. But I do think there have been attempts by some directors to experiment, mixing live with online and audiovisual. I am interested in the hybrid and am currently waiting for young creatives who may be the ones who have been able to experiment with more time and freedom to see what the pandemic generates in the years to come.
P. Sometimes it seems that they are trying to put things back the way they were before.
R It doesn’t make sense on a narrative, aesthetic or social level to say, “That’s it, it’s over, let’s go back to before”. We need to take responsibility for what happened to us, for feeling things, for things happening to us, for losing people and for seeing each other again in a different way. In the theater it also has to be reflected.
P. How was the return to the stage?
R. We’re still in a moment of transition, but I sense a lot of enthusiasm to return to theater that’s striking and symptomatic of what we’ve said before. People have a harder time going back to the cinema than to the theatre.
P. Why?
R. Cinema has more national competitions, theater is live, you have to see it and share that space and time. Now that we were touring Italy with a new play, The Years, the theaters were full and many stayed for the talk that followed. I felt there was a lot of interest not only in the work but also in meeting up again and hearing about what we had been doing during the pandemic.
P Used to the theater, how was the transition to cinema?
R I felt like it gave us a level of freedom that we haven’t had in a long time. And since we filmed many outdoors, life on the road forced us to deal with unforeseen events with a spontaneity that’s harder to achieve in the theater.
P. All three films revolve around the audience’s reconstruction of a play. Everyone tells it in their own way. How is this process of completing the meaning of what is seen on stage?
R. We were very interested in how the experience is remembered. When you see a movie, you can say “watch it or download it”. A game is more difficult for the other person to see. It creates a lot more narrative and a lot more memory because the viewers are creating a fiction as they tell it. It’s the same thing that happens when we tell the past. We change it every time because we ride different routes. You keep reinventing yourself, building a fiction of yourself, which is very similar to what happens in memory.
P. Is the same happening in Argentina? With this look and the permanent narration of the past
R. Argentina is a country built on vast myths and omissions from its past. The mythification of the origin of the Argentines, the mythification of Argentina’s wealth at the beginning of the 20th century. If you start digging, you realize it wasn’t exactly like that. And there is also an Argentine passion for constantly reinventing this collective past and reinventing its history, which has a lot to do with theater as a generator of fictions.
P. In the film about Buenos Aires, the piece chosen is an impersonator of former President Fernando de la Rúa, and the memory of the performance is mixed with personal memories of the 2001 crisis. Why this choice?
R. Because 2001 was the moment when the Argentines stopped being spectators to become protagonists of the story. And the three films do the same thing, they return to the protagonist audience. Also, in Buenos Aires, almost all scenes are recorded in the center, which is the site of all political mobilizations.