Búho

The experimental psychologist Endel Turving proposed two types of memory in 1972. Episodic memory allows us to remember the what, when and where of a specific experience. Autobiographical memory, which... generates self-awareness in narratives of the past and plays a fundamental role in the construction of personal identity. The protagonist of BÚHO is a forensic anthropologist who asks many questions to the bones of corpses in order to reconstruct stories with few certainties. An accident leaves him without memory, and now it is he who seeks the answers that a psychologist invites him to write down in the pages of a notebook, so that he can come closer to the maxim of the novelist Luis Landero: ‘Write what you remember and you will tell the truth’. The dramaturgy enhances the narrative value of technical elements that combine beauty and efficiency. Lighting, sound space and visual projections transform the scenography to build a bridge between the intense clarity of a horizontal present and the vertical depth of a forgotten memory. That anguish that goes from a clearly recognisable world to the shadows of a grotto where memories lie, flashes of light on fragments of the past, and an Ariadne’s thread unable to find the way out of the labyrinth towards life. The work of the actors moves with fluidity and versatility between two different levels of interpretation. The overwhelming organic simplicity allows them to handle the truth of dialogues that turn over and over again on a disorder that repeats itself. The visual strength of the body work brings verisimilitude to a dreamlike world, where choreography and gestures are on a narrative level with the well-ordered words, until rhythm and movement convey the desires and emotions of a lost mind.
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Hands up anyone who does not have someone close to them who has not suddenly or gradually lost their memory in a cruel and irreversible way: agonisingly painful, in any... case, at whatever rate. Neurological studies speak of an epidemic in recent decades of ailments linked to this journey of no return that is a precipice to nothingness not only for those who suffer it in the flesh, but also, and in the form of vicarious helplessness, for those close to them who sink in the face of the evidence that someone who was once able to move forward, to fight and care for themselves is now a person who has become a person of no return, and care for himself is now a lifeless body, with his memories drowned in oblivion, vulnerable and dependent, and, as a result of this hecatomb, devoid of the identity that was the backbone of his existence and which is no more and no less than the some of the experiences of a whole journey placed one after the other: we are because we were and, without awareness of our past, it is not possible to sustain the present or build any future. To convert this anguished loop into art, to sublimate this cesspit to the point of elevating it to the category of a shareable aesthetic product without falling into the tearful, the melodramatic or the most reprehensible pathetic fallacy is a merit of very few, and Titzina Teatro achieve it in full, the prestigious Catalan group that performed on Saturday the 13th of April on the stage of the Teatro Pedro Muñoz Seca in the second season of its spring season to present ‘Búho’, which has been touring Spain since last year, garnering enthusiastic reviews. And this is no coincidence, because the result is a suggestive, original proposal, with an immersive vocation, now that immersive is so fashionable, but not in the most celebratory or mild sense of the term, but as an experience capable of trapping the spectator from the first minute of the production to push them without condescension into the depths of the blind, deaf and claustrophobic womb into which Pablo, a forensic anthropologist in his mid-forties after suffering a stroke, is dragged. We accompany Pablo in his particular investigation of ‘personal anthropology’, as he himself says at one point in the play, and we get to know him through his broken evocations in scenes of discontinuous linearity, as could not be otherwise, The fabulous acting work of Diego Lorca and Paco Merino, who create a powerful dramaturgy as powerful as the physical effort that endows Búho with a masterly compactness and a rhythm where the actions move cadenced, as if floating across the stage turned into a cave. And as the credits of some films say, this solvent project would not have been possible without the technical direction of Albert Anglada and the effective costumes of Ona Grau. And, of course, without the simple but powerful set design (less is more) built by Albert Ventura and La Forja del Vallés based on Rocío Peña’s design, which we could not enjoy without Jordi Thomás’ successful lighting: everything is imbricated in a miraculous balance. Joan Rodón’s poignant projections enrich this scenography, renewing this resource, fashionable twenty years ago and which ended up breaking down due to exhaustion from so much use. But here it is by no means a mere addition, but part of an organic whole where the sound space devised by Jonatan Bernabeu and Tomomi Kubo is also a nuclear element, contributing so much to making the spectator feel enveloped in an unsettling, sticky nightmare from which, nevertheless, very few would want to wake up, such is the scorching magnetism of this luminous fall into the most sombre forgetfulness.
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The day ended with Titzina’s “BÚHO”, at the Pazo da Cultura. A theatrical piece with a narrative that mixes cinematographic language procedures with others of the Chinese shadow theater, objects... and even physical theater. The story of a forensic anthropologist, specialized in Paleolithic sites, who suffers a stroke and loss of memory. The show dispenses with dramatic form and, in that more cinematic and fragmented narrative, achieves scenes of verisimilitude that even distressed me. I was quite impressed, many times I think that my memory is failing me or that it is not responding to my requirements. But I was also able to enjoy, thanks to that sublimation in which the magnificent actors did not their only interpretation, they also draw and they take us to the poetry and the mystery that wraps up. The mystery of the mind linked, here, with the mystery of those bones of that first artist who painted bison and deer in the cave where, supposedly, the protagonist anthropologist had the accident.
I think there can be no better way to start autumn. Chestnut time, of mushrooms, of extraordinary colors in the forests, but also of gathering in the theaters in the heat of ancient living arts. We are already in winter, but it is stil autumn.
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