One of the most brilliant choreographers and directors of the latest generation, Marcos Morau, founder in Barcelona of the La Veronal collective, has shown a sophisticated, delightfully illogical style capable of capturing attention through wit and sensitivity. Seen at Oriente Occidente 2015 with Voronia, the show in which he explored evil through the metaphor of the world's deepest cave in the Western Caucasus, he now returns to the Festival with Los pájaros muertos.
Fascinating this time for the Valencian artist is Pablo Picasso. So he starts from the eponymous Cubist painting of 1912 to enter the life of the great Spanish painter. A journey that moves from the work to the people Picasso met during his long life spanning over ninety years and his favourite places: from sunny Malaga to Parisian cafés, from the atmospheres of the Belle Époque to the devastating climate of the two world wars and the Spanish Civil War. Nourished by surprising visual images, the show conceived for non-theatre spaces testifies to an intense relationship with the place that hosts it: on stage there is acting and dancing, with professionals and amateurs selected from time to time on site by Morau.
The ‘dead birds’ are therefore all those characters that Picasso met and who disappeared before him. Marilyn Monroe, Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi are mentioned in the show, which, according to the author, ‘is a bombardment of ideas’. For if the doubt arises as to how it is possible to recount Pablo Picasso in just fifty minutes, Morau unhesitatingly dispels it in one line: ‘Didn't Picasso manage to recount a war in a painting? That is the merit of art'.
