It is Erri de Luca, with his poem-manifesto Valore ("I give value to every life form, the snow, the strawberry, the fly”) who inspires Pep Ramis for his latest solo The Mountain, the Truth & the Paradise. A solo that arises from Ramis’ need, at fifty, to return to the stage alone to strengthen his artistic experience and re-examine a path stratified over the years with the Mal Pelo company he founded in 1989 together with María Muñoz in Celrà, Catalonia. It is here, since 2000, where their center for the arts and interdisciplinary exchanges L'animal a l’esquena (The animal on the back, from the title of their celebrated 2009 duet) exists in an area of 19 hectares of uncontaminated land.
The Mountain, the Truth & the Paradise is immersed in the present with a very personal gaze, in stops and starts, at times funny, at times tragic, on human beings and the surrounding world. Sixty minutes in which the abuse of the landscape, forgotten values, religion and its clichés emerge with a punch. Ramis' body chisels air and space, his warm voice declaiming texts which swing between intimidation and prayer- he sets aside witticisms.
Peppered with literary and biblical references, The Mountain, the Truth & the Paradise is dominated by the element of dust. It is dust that covers the stage like white snow, that becomes ash on the main performer’s head, smoke that intoxicates with movement, the steam of global warming. It almost seems that Ramis wants to embody in this performance a well-known line from T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust". But about what fear is he talking? About death or more simply about the fear dictated by the discovery of having lost something truly important for something trivial?
