Companyia Sargantana, these days better known as ciasargantana, is a hotbed of performance, research, methodology and technology. They have reformed several times, always bringing something new to the table when the dust has cleared, and are currently active in a small town of Ripoll in the Pyrenees. We had a chat with ciasargantana’s founder and director, Jordi Pérez i Soldevila.
TAIKABOX: Let’s start with some history. You started out as an actor, and started writing at about the same time, but you have described that you wanted to be in the creative lead. You still do all of those things – direct, write and act?
Jordi: Yeah, I still do all of those things. I started as an amateur actor when I was four. I don’t know why, but I felt a need to be on stage. Maybe I was used to that, I don’t know. I think I was fourteen or so when I realized that when you do comedy, when you feel that you can make just a small movement and the audience reacts, it feels nice, it feeds your ego.
But I am really curious about the world, and I felt that the performing arts was a good place to learn about a lot of different things. Each play, you learn a bit of history, you learn a little bit more about human behaviour. So, for me, it was a good place to be like a kind of da Vinci, learning about everything.
For me, the easiest thing was to be on stage, to be an actor. But after you cure your ego, the need to research and to relate to the audience, to offer an experience and ways to think about the stuff that’s important to the audience, I think that remains.
Have you ever felt other ways of interacting with an audience than acting? Music, or…
I also do music. In all the music in our performances, if there is music, I compose it myself. I started out as a singer, then I learned the piano, then the drums. Now I’m learning to play the guitar. But it’s so different. Music comes to me when I sleep. I wake up and have dreamt the music, whereas the text comes when I’m walking.
Things like story and narrative come to you when you’re doing something else, but music comes from your subconscious?
Yeah, well, when you are there, walking, things appear. But rewriting and editing, I sit and write. I can be more aware of the tempo, read and change the words. When I lived in Barcelona, I walked in the streets and I could hear the dialogue between different characters. Here in the Pyrenees, I can walk around or mow the lawn.
I imagine your current, more peaceful surroundings make it easier? Barcelona can be quite hectic.
I actually like chaos and noise, it helps me. Usually, when I study, I think my mind is too busy, so I sometimes listen to progressive rock. When I hear all the instruments, my mind can focus on something. At some point, my mind just closes and goes somewhere. Artist performances are of course different, but for me Nils Frahm is a composer with a really interesting universe..
You started out on stage. Did you do only comedy at the time? Was it stand-up?
No, but I did do a lot of comedy before being a professional, and also some comedies when I started as an actor. When you’re able to control the tempo and the rhythm of the lines, it’s really fun to learn how to guide audiences. In the beginning I wondered why the audience was laughing, and I tested things, realizing what things have what effect on the audience. For me, that was really nice, thinking “now I’m going to do this”, and realizing I could make the audience laugh at a certain point I wanted.
It’s been said that comedy is the hardest genre to write, because so much depends on the delivery. Did you already write dialogue or text in the beginning?
My first text was a comic one, about the Carnival, which is going on right now, actually. I wrote the text in the nineties to be performed outdoors. I was sixteen, I think. But the theatre company didn’t accept the text – they were afraid that the police would ban us. I sometimes use some comic words, but I’m not usually writing comedy. I’m more into metaphorical, symbolic text, closer to Heiner Müller.
I feel it’s evolved. In the beginning it was a cinematographic, very linear, very aristotelian way of writing – leading the audience into a kind of a safe place, a pleasing place, and it changed step by step. I also like to think about the artistic way to relate with the audience, to go deeper. In an artist performance now, I like to think which is going to be the best way to approach this, and it’s dangerous, because when someone wants to hire you, the artistic performance can change. It’s difficult to sell.
Do you think that you have a signature in your writing, a Jordi Perez trademark? A lowest common denominator?
I don’t know, the risk? [laughs] And the research is always there. I think my kind of writing is always very personal. Even when it’s evolving, I think it’s kind of deep and heavy. I try to be less heavy, but maybe it’s just the way my mind works. Yeah, it’s dense. My mother asks me every time I premiere a performance, “Why is it always so gloomy?”. I’m usually relating to society’s problems, so it’s usually quite dark. I try to put some humor there, but it’s been like this from the beginning. I try to go lighter because I realize it’s hard. And I try to erase a lot of the ideas that are in the first draft of the show. Once I have the first draft, I send it to some close friends and colleagues. Some of them are experienced theatregoers, others aren’t, and this gives me a wider vision from their feedback. And the feedback helps me to choose what stays and what is out.
Would you describe yourself as a harsh editor? Is it the necessity of the feedback, or do you feel you have to do better?
In the end, I want the audience to be able to relate. I also want the audience to have some feedback system, some connection. I don’t like creations that just please the audience and anyone can access it. Nowadays, culture is very disconnected. We have a huge history in performing arts, and we have to find some kind of connection with that. The audience mustn’t forget this. We have methods, images or myths that define ourselves as societies or as a culture or something. I don’t like to forget this.
If you go to see a Kandinsky painting, you have to know some things to understand that painting. So, we have this constant discussion, a struggle with the team whether we should make completely accessible creations for audiences with no knowledge of performing arts or art in general, or accept and use all the artistic tradition. Initially, I feel the need to find an artistic approach to the stage, and it generates a specific language, which forces the audience to have a minimum knowledge of the art. So, I usually try to have different levels approaching different kinds of audiences.. If there are people who come to be entertained, they will still find something there, but I like to give the more educated audience a different connection.
Let’s talk about directing. Like acting, it can be very different whether the actor is on stage or in front of a camera.
Yeah, that’s why we have developed our system. In 2009, we opened our laboratory to answer this question in part. We were working and had two different approaches whether we were on stage or in front of a camera. So I tried to develop a way that could be close, or at least so I’d know what exact small things I could modify when working in one place or the other. That’s what we call the iam system. I’ve studied a lot of different methodologies, and at some point I tried the Argentinian version of the Actor’s Studio method, and it was too hard for me. We were doing Oedipus King. in a theatre for maybe 70 days, and at the time I couldn’t sleep, because I was too depressed with what I experienced on stage. One day a friend of mine came and asked “Where were you?” I was completely destroyed emotionally and he and the audience didn’t catch any of that. I realized then that that wasn’t for me. I started learning all these different methodologies and found these physical actions from Stanislavski’s late part of his life, how they are connected. So I thought there’s something there, but I still needed to find something that would still be healthy and useful and connected to nowadays performance needs.l. And this physical action system was the starting point for developing our new methodology.
We opened this laboratory, and after we decided we’d teach in cycles. Every cycle started by defining a very simple question which we would try to answer, then create a new question and answer that. The questions could be like “what is the most useful way to work at home in order to prepare for rehearsal or recording”, then step by step we developed a way of performing. It helps. We divide the performer in four parts we call lives: the physical, the verbal, the psychological and the emotional. So, for us, the emotional life is the result of the other three lives. Emotion is like the plumb inside this hockey ball, it gives the power, but you cannot directly relate to that, you work with the other three lives, and let emotion follow. If you’re in a big theatre, you want to use more of your physical work, if you’re in front of the stage or in front of the camera in a closeup, you can push more of your psychological work. So, this was the structure of how to put our attention and relate to what we are doing on stage. Then, we are using actions to each other, like if we have to do something to somebody – to seduce, or insult, accuse – this is the structure we use in our preparation of the work on stage. In the beginning, at home, you prepare these actions, but after rehearsing, it has to become an impulse action, you have to find this need. It’s quite connected with the physical actions and the pinch and ouch from Meisner, the emotional work has connection to Grotowski.
As a layman who doesn’t know much about the actual craft, that is something I never think about, but of course you need to have a way to get into the role.
Depending on your starting point and where you’re focusing in your work, you create a different thing. That’s why I left the Argentinian way of working, why it wasn’t for me. It’s absolutely physical first, just do, working by doing. The emotion is a result of a good work, it’s not the work itself. If someone seduces me, emotions will come out, even if they pretend it, if they do it really really well. So if I go there and I approach very aggressively, I will generate an emotion in the other, and his emotion will generate my emotion. It’s a wheel.
So that might become a feedback loop, that an emotion creates more of that emotion in return.
Well, it’s always action-reaction. For me, this reaction also defines behaviour, which is a thing that interests me, why someone behaves the way he does. With this action-reaction I can understand all behaviours. And for me, the thing that happens between two bodies, is what the audience can relate to, not one. The audience cannot relate to what is happening inside myself, but they can relate to what is happening between bodies. They relate to the energy.
As a director, how do you approach the actors’ methods when they differ from yours?
I try to understand a little about how they work. If it’s a personal way how an actor works, it’s fine. There are some systems that only are useful if everyone is working with that system, and I don’t like this approach. But I try to work with verbs and actions, because if I tell someone “seduce the other”, they will understand me and do it in their own way, easily knowing what they have to do. So, I try to give very clear instructions. I always try to give space to them. I prepare things and may have possible options in my mind, but I always let the performer start. I prefer to work with what comes after the performer.
I try to see the flow that they offer me, and to see if it works or not. Just to give them a path to that, and if not, then try to offer an option related to what they offered me. But I never do, “copy this”, “go there” – I don’t do that.
There probably isn’t a right way to direct, but there must be wrong ways to direct, because of the power balance and how it affects the work environment.
Yeah. For me, I always try to set very clear rules in the beginning so everybody knows how we’re going to work. After meeting the actors, I have a very clear idea on what I want to say to the audience and why am I using this text. Even when I read my text, I try to change my point of view. I wrote it as a writer, but now as a director, what am I going to focus on? So, I have an idea of what I want to offer to the audience, and then, inside this idea, I give the space to the performer. But I also try to talk to the performer, to put everybody on the same path. It’s like, you can go a hundred meters from me, but we all have to go there and we have to follow this path to get there. And maybe we’ll find a better way [than what I had thought], I’m open to modifying or adapting to what I had in my mind in the beginning. If we have enough time to rehearse, usually a better thing will come out from the team, than what I had in my home, writing the text.
So you’re not an auteur in the strict sense.
No. I write the dialogue for the audience, but I want the team I’m working with to be part of this creation and to understand there are no egos here, not mine or theirs, and that we are working to give the audience something. And they’re also giving the audience a place so they in turn can generate their vision. I don’t like telling the audience what they should think or feel. For example, the show we’re going to perform, I’ve written the script eight times. In November or December, after our first reading, we saw that if we are using VR, it’s not going to work like this. So, after that, we developed it, then in December invited some people to see the show and after that, talked to them. And then I re-modified the script on what they told us about it. I think that’s a good way… to listen and… I’m not a god, it’s impossible to have done it right the first time.
Do you have trusted collaborators, are they always the same people?
Yeah, although not everybody is always available and willing to work this way. There are performers who prefer to be told how to say things and where to go. For me, this is boring. I can do it, if they pay me enough, but it’s boring. I like this research, I like discovering things. And if the team doesn’t follow the same vision, it’s really difficult to discover things.
Has it gotten any easier in the twenty or so years you have been doing this?
Well, I know that something will always come. I’m more comfortable with the risk. I’ve learned some skills, some strategies and some tools that I know always work, so if I’m struggling I have this little box that I can always use. But I’ve learned to have fun in this risky world of research.
Let’s talk about CiaSargantana. Did you found the company all by yourself?
No, not at all. But it has changed a lot during the years. In the beginning, there was Dani. We did a semi-professional version of Rent. There were something like thirty people, live musicians, with set design like on Broadway, everything. It was really big. And then I decided that ok, now it’s time to study. Some of us decided to continue, and I wrote a text for thirteen actors, two of them were kids, completely crazy. And then we started with Dani and also my brother. Then it changed. My brother is in engineering, working in business. My first partner, Dani, decided it was too hard. He took a different path because of lack of money and too much risk. But you have to be able to struggle. To not have enough money to eat. It’s hard.
So, in the beginning it was my friends and my brother. We had different stages, new partners, some difficult times. We opened a theatre in 2013, and until 2019 we tried to find different ways of 10 people working together. We tried different ways of working, sharing tasks, but it didn’t work out – again, because there was not enough money. We had this idea of a big laboratory company like in the 60s, but there is not a place in our society for this kind of structure. Now we are three and work project by project.
In the beginning, we didn’t have a place. We used cultural houses and such. But if you don’t have a place, it’s really difficult to evolve. You have to have a place where you can leave your things and continue working the next day. So then we opened Studio Sargantana, our first laboratory and a studio in Barcelona, and started developing things there. In the beginning we were only researching how to work as a performer, then continuing to dramaturgy, how to structure the dialogue with the audience. Then, this evolved and we started inviting people there. We had the Workcentre of Grotowski and living workshops, and other companies were performing there. For example, we had a very small show of maybe twenty people in the audience in 2012. But it was the beginning of Twitter, and we had some influencers there, just tweeting our show live. And we had ten thousand people following the show. It was quite strange.
This was really growing, and we decided to open our theatre in 2013. We had our research, teaching our methodology, other people coming to create, we had productions every week. We grew a lot. But we opened this place in order to find a new way of working that would result in a less self-exploited way. We wanted to offer a more sustainable and fair trade to the companies performing in our venue. Perhaps this was not sustainable. So we defined very clear red lines and a very clear way of working, and in 2019 we crossed some of these red lines. And we decided that this project could still be working for centuries in Barcelona if we accept this way of working that we were trying to fight against, otherwise we have to close. And that’s why we closed.
We decided that the most important thing for us was the laboratory. We tried to find a place that was calm and suitable for the research, and that’s why we came here. We had some shows in Europe in 2019, and then COVID came, and all the shows and projects were dead, so we found ourselves here, isolated in the mountains. It’s good because it’s calm, but we are an important part of the engine of cultural life here in Ripoll. If we don’t generate it, there’s not a lot of cultural life. So we feel quite lonely sometimes here. 10 000 people live in Ripoll. It’s the capital of the region but it’s hard. The lack of political will to support and nurture cultural life has led to a tangible sense of social disconnection in public life. You can feel the depression in the streets, it’s really aggressive nowadays here.
A lot of people have just given up on the cultural work they do, finding jobs in other fields, while some have found refuge from writing and preparing for the time after. I think you are one of the latter.
Yeah. We were really exhausted after this theatre experience. Having a lot of problems with the building and we saw we were crossing the red lines, seeing that we were trying to change things but we were too small. So we were really exhausted from this era. I focused on learning Unity, for example, and doing physical work, and trying to think about what’s next. I was also thinking about stopping. Luckily, I knew a quite important man here called Albert Vidal, who is almost 80 now, and a very well known performer from the 1970s and 1980s.
Working for him and in his laboratory and seeing his vision gave me some hope, or understanding, of our society in Catalonia. How our moment was completely different from the 70s and 80s, when performing arts and culture was quite important. It was an era that is no longer our own. La fura dels Baus, Comediants, Joglars, these big companies. So, relating all this history he gave me some energy to continue.
Can you tell me what brought virtual reality into your work?
Well, I also studied telecommunication engineering. We have always had technology in this laboratory. But in 2017, it started growing. Some of the performers didn’t like working with technology at all and found it really boring. At the time we were working with Kinect and it was really boring for them, I can understand that. Then, we got funding from Barcelona city to develop this and to teach vulnerable youth how to use the computer to do live performances, giving them options to earn some money with a simple computer. So, we started this connection with technology. Mapping, sound looping, all these things.
I don’t know exactly why VR appeared. I found this White Holel Theatre in the Netherlands while I was looking for new ways to approach audiences. I feel that here, the audience is usually very old, so I was trying to find ways to approach young audiences who don’t usually like traditional theatre. VR was becoming more available, and I saw a production and thought that this might be the way to connect with these younger audiences. We were doing a trilogy about migration, and we had a text that we rehearsed and realized that the stage wasn’t the right way to do this. Then we had a residency in a very big theatre for two weeks, and a lot of huge images appeared to be part of the show. And we said that if we don’t have enough money we won’t do this, we’re not well known enough and it’s a huge show.
VR seemed like a good way to generate these images. It felt an innovative way and was the first of its kind in Catalonia, and there weren’t many in Europe. So it seemed like a good way to generate these images from the residency and also to give ourselves a new opening to connect to the audience. Before this, we did another experiment called SocCos, which mixed VR and AR, and we saw audiences of all ages were really interested.
We’ve seen that audiences are connecting, it’s nice. We are learning a lot of things, also changing a lot of ways how we rehearse. VR also affects the structure of how we rehearse – the battery time has a limit, the capacity of the bodies when moving in the VR world is different. In the physical world, you can spend eight hours rehearsing, in the VR world, some performers get tired really soon. You have to set up a place to rehearse in the digital world – we have a digital mirror in one of the rooms, so we can see what we are doing, it’s a second body. We rehearse some things without the VR, and then go into the VR environment. Usually, you have a technician who changes the scene to another, but when you are rehearsing with actors, you don’t need that much tech. It changes a lot, the structure and the period of rehearsals.
But the audience is having a really good time. They can spend more than an hour with VR glasses and they all feel fine with it.
Is it always in the stage setting in a theatre, or are you planning to stream the performance, go fully digital and virtual?
No. I think that what we are willing to do is keep a real live connection. But I don’t know. This week we were rehearsing with our technician who lives 60 kilometres away, and he appeared in the virtual world. So maybe it’s worth researching the digital solution. There is a lag of about one second in the VR environment, and even though the audience has noise cancelling headphones, a little bit of the live voices on stage come through, and then the VR character voice. It’s nice because they realize that it’s really live. But the characters have effects, one character especially has a huge effect and that lag disturbs some of the audience.
Let’s talk about La Cuina a little.
La Cuina means “Kitchen” in Catalan. It’s where we developed all these systems. We had three different lines: Fractal, where we developed technology and arts; Living Through Action, where we developed actor work; and Dramaturgy of The Action, where we focused on how to structure the performance. All these worked through cycles, structured in finding answers to very specific questions, sometimes inviting the audience to see if what we were doing worked. At some point, especially after 2015, it was impossible to keep this going on with all the actors involved, we had no possibility to pay them. We were struggling. Some or most of the actors felt bad, because they weren’t able to give what they wanted in the sessions. We wanted to find a useful and healthy way of working, and this was unhealthy. So we closed it and transformed it into Transborders in 2017, which was shorter periods of time for research and it’s a wandering laboratory. Someone invites us somewhere, we do an open call, and we meet there and research.
That’s quite interesting, since usually research of the process of things is done where the initiators are. It sounds flexible.
Yeah. We did some sessions in Italy, and it was great. It changed the rhythm. Here, it’s impossible to get funding for people to do research. You can get funding for show development but not for research. But we received funding from France and from Italy. In France, participants even got paid. Everybody was more willing to try to do research and see what comes out of that.
This is something we have now dipped our toes in with the EU Dance Hack. And Sargantana is applying with us for the continuation of the project, probably bringing a more narrative perspective to the concept. Since you are not a dance company per se, what sort of ideas do you have?
I’m really related to the body. For me there is a connection. And we sometimes work with dancers, and this connection is interesting to me. We give them a more structured path in the vision of the audience. So, for me this connection is nice. They give us another approach of expression, and we can give them another path to tell the story. Dance also pushes the technology we are going to use in the Dance Hack. The quality, or the precision of small movements will probably require more than what we are going to use.
Structure in a five-day residency based on improvising with the moving body is something I haven’t thought of.
It’s kind of a direction. We also improvise in the beginning, sometimes. As I told you, we are working with verbs. “Now you seduce.” And the performer has the freedom to do this verb in another way than the dancer. This is the structure that can guide the audience. We also like to work with loops of movement, trying to find symbols. A movement or a position as a symbol of something else. So, I think that dancers will try to find different ways to find these.
I’m not thinking about these paths as pre-thought things, but a part of the improvisation. It’s going to be interesting to see how the movement develops. Is it trying to build to give something to the audience?
What’s in the future of you and ciasargantana?
We are still thinking about the connection of XR and live arts. We’re trying to discover what comes out of this. We’re thinking of a creation with more XR, using more augmented reality. In the last rehearsals of the new show we realized more and more the change of audience behaviour when they are in this VR world. This anonymity, knowing they are anonymous and they are free, it changes the morality of people. And also, the evolution of all social media, how they are changing minds and behaviors. So, we want to create something, talking about this using virtual and augmented reality. But we want the physical body to be more present. So now we are trying to find options, because the VR technology we are using now is not as precise as we need for the next project. So we’re trying to find ways to get mocap suits.
And that’s our future, trying to research in this way. I’m being quite chaotic now, it’s hard to explain because it’s only on paper for now. We’re taking the idea of Marina Abramovic’s performance into the VR world, trying to show the audience how technology can alter your thoughts and your morality. Make people aware of this in an artistic way. And we are still doing our social creations here. We have a project in Girona called Un Mateix Desert at the end of May about how minorized cultures came to survive in the 21st century. We have quite a lot of things going on. We’re quite hyperactive now.
These are in the [body + space ] + technology line of the laboratory, and in the social projects line. We do site-specific creations with a topic that we think is important for the society to talk about, and take what we call local witnesses, local people related to this topic, and after hearing them we invite them to be part of our artistic creation as some kind of performers. It may be site-specific, interactive… Something new.
Jordi Pérez was chatting online with Pasi Pirttiaho