La Pesca

In 1978, Ricardo Bartís became known as a theatre and film actor before creating his company, Sportivo Teatral, in 1981. Located in an old renovated workshop which is a teaching, research and performance centre at the same time, the collective jealously protects its autonomy rejecting all the compromises of the conventional and institutional theatre. Working many months on his shows, starting with improvisations, stressing the physical stagecraft that engages the entire actor in his communication, accepting the constraints of a relatively cramped venue, mixing amateur and professional actors, Sportivo Teatral has become the indispensable place for critical, polemic and poetic theatre. Shows that are emblematic of this work: Postales argentinas (1989), El Corte (1996), De mal en peor (2005) and La Pesca (Fishing, 2008), should not conceal the adventures carried out with Eduardo Pavlovsky (Teleranas, 1985), Beckett (La Ultima Cinta Magnetica, 1986 and Krapp's Last Tape, 2000), Shakespeare (Hamlet, 1991), Roberto Arlt (El Pecado que no se puede nombrar [The Unnamed Sin], 1999) and Ibsen (Hedda Gabler, 2007). At the Festival d'Avignon, Ricardo Bartís presented El Pecado que no se puede nombrar by Robert Arlt in 1999 and was supposed to present Donde más duele (There Where It Hurts the Most) in 2003.

A private setting for three men of two different generations who are in a basement in Buenos Aires, a fishing club abandoned in the 1970s, the “Gesta Heroïca”. This basement is located above an underground river that crosses the city. There are no longer any fish in it apart from the myth of the “Titan” tararira, a giant fish that was supposed to have devoured the others and that the oldest members of the club say they have seen. Ricardo Bartís, using this story as a base, builds, with the Sportivo Teatral's actors, a microcosm of characters who hold discussions on politics, love and morality and in this way journey through Argentina's reality as close as possible to its concerns, its fantasies and its history. The reign of Peron, the military dictatorship and democracy are the stuff of the conversations and debates of these three men who carry within themselves the melancholy of time that passes, disappointments of all sorts, childhood dreams that have not come true, frustrations in love and the fear of death. All that remains for them is the “Titan” tararira to escape from this mediocre daily life, all that remains for them is the myth of the giant fish so that they can continue to live. Always imagined with a great deal of closeness between the actors and the public, this work is a new step in the process of reappropriating the human being that Ricardo Bartís and Sportivo Teatral carry out, aware as they are of the growing dehumanization that strikes so-called developed societies, and the Argentine society in particular. Always with boundless energy, mixing fierceness, tenderness and humour, never rejecting polemics, they want to communicate their conception of a theatre of non-asepticized, unconventional actors in constant movement, theatre that makes it possible to observe the complexity of man in the grip of the world's complexities.

CAREFULL CHANGE OF SITE:
mise en scène et scénographie: Ricardo Bartís
avec: Sergio Boris, Carlos Defeo, Luis Machín
costumes: Magda Banach
assistante à la mise en scène: Jazmín Antar
production: Lorena Regueiro, Domingo Romano

production: Sportivo Teatral
production de la tournée européenne: Festival d'Avignon, Festival delle Colline Torinesi, Theater der Welt 2008 in Halle, Hebbel am Ufer-Berlin, deSingel (Anvers), TNBA-Théâtre national de Bordeaux en Aquitaine - Festival ¡Mira!
avec le soutien: de la Direction générale des Affaires culturelles - ministère argentin des Relations extérieures, du Commerce international et du Culte
avec l'aide de: l'Onda pour les surtitres