The Fura dels Baus

A show by La Fura dels Baus at the Singapore Festival (2007).

La Fura dels Baus is a Spanish theater company created in 1979 by Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca, Carlus Padrissa, Pere Tantinyà, Quico Palomar and Teresa Puig. Self-defined as a theater group «friction» that seeks a scenic space different from the traditional one, its assemblies and various products have evolved mixing imagination, morbidity, performance, mechatronics and highly spectacular installations, in a dramatic context of collective creation.

Currently, the company operates as an artistic company for large shows, which integrates various registers of text theater, digital theater, opera and the film genre. Its team is made up of hundreds of people, including actors, athletes, tightrope walkers, technicians, designers, managers and collaborators, among others. Among the most recognized members who have passed through the company are, in addition to the founders themselves, Àlex Ollé, Miki Espuma, Jürgen Müller, Pep Gatell, Jordi Arús, Hansel Cereza and Michael Summers, Quico Palomar, Teresa Puig and Mireia Romero. Among the closest collaborators is the actor Eduard Fernández, winner of a Goya for his performance in Faust 5.0.

His vast career adds to date close to three thousand performances and around three million viewers.

The name of the company, untranslatable, alludes to a ferret ("fura" in Catalan) supposedly endemic to an area known as Els Balçans or Els Baus, a torrent that crosses the town of Moyá, later converted into a landfill.

History

Show Naumaquia at the SummerTyne Festival 2007, at the spring of Spillers, Newcastle.

Inauguration of the Perth International Arts Festival 2010.

La Fura dels Baus, began as a street theater group in the Catalan town of Moyá at the end of the 1970s, doing parades and participating in parties and "entoldados". In 1979, the directors at that time, Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca, Carlus Padrissa and Pere Tantinyà, left their hometown to move to Barcelona.

There the group began to integrate tools of the independent theater, to later develop a more personal style, in which most of its productions from the first period, between 1979 and 1989, are inscribed. Antúnez Roca left the group at the end of this period.

The company rose to fame during the 1990s, after its participation in the opening ceremony of the Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games, as an experimental theater company, together with the more traditional theater company Comediants, and distinguished international musicians, such as Ryūichi Sakamoto. This event was followed by million-dollar contracts to promote well-known commercial brands, such as Pepsi, Mercedes-Benz, Peugeot, Volkswagen, Swatch, Airtel, Microsoft, Absolut Vodka, Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros., Puerto of Barcelona, Telecom Italia or Sun Microsystems, as well as the contracting for the realization of massive participations in events such as the Mediterranean Games of 2005, in Almería; the SummerTyne 2007, in Newcastle; or the Perth International Arts Festival 2010, in Perth.

The Norwegian freighter Arold, converted into the “Naumon”, the company’s floating performing arts centre in 2004.

Since 1996 the company also began producing operas, with Atlántida, by Manuel de Falla and Ernesto Halffter. This opera was followed by several others, among them The Martyrdom of San Sebastián by Claude Debussy, the following year; The Damnation of Faust, by Hector Berlioz, for the Salzburg Festival in 1999, and The Fable of Orpheus, by Claudio Monteverdi, made in the holds of his ship "Naumon" in the Old Port of Barcelona for the 400th anniversary of its premiere in 1607, in the Italian city of Mantua.

As for other formats, in 1997 the company carried out Work in progress, a digital theater show where scenes that occurred simultaneously in different cities were connected via the Internet. They entered the film industry with the film Fausto 5.0, in collaboration with director Isidro Ortiz.

The company has also toured Latin America. In 2011 he opened the Bicentennial of Uruguay, and later performed in venues such as the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires (2012) and the Municipal Theater in Santiago de Chile.^{[citation required]}

Manifesto scoundrel.

Written by Andreu Morte at the beginning of the eighties to vindicate the Furero language, based on the sensualization of the stage environment. They define it as an act of rebellion against dramatic literature. It is a proposal for the collectivization of dramaturgy. The defense of his physical theater in intense. Andreu Morte affirms in him the beginnings of the group, its process of cohesion, its enthusiasm for life and its desire to transgress traditional stage creation.

The manifesto, written in 1983, is as follows:

1. FdB (The Fura dels Baus) is not a social phenomenon, it is not a group, it is not a political group, it is not a circle of related friendships, it is not a pro-some cause association.
2. FdB is a criminal organization within the current art landscape.
3. FdB is the result of a symbiosis of ten distinct and peculiar elements that favor each other in their development.
4. FdB is closer to the self-definition of fauna than to the model of the citizen.
5. FdB is a symbiosis of behaviors without rules and without preconceived trajectories. It works as a mechanical gear and generates activity by pure need and empathy.
6. FdB does not expect anything from the past, does not learn from traditional sources and does not like prefabricated and modern folklore.

Style

The company's works seek to stimulate the imagination and also provoke the viewer, through elements of morbidity, performance, mechatronics and highly spectacular installations.

In their most personal creations they use what they themselves call the «Fura language», that is, the use of collective creation processes based on acting disinhibition exercises, which give rise to shows in non-conventional spaces, where the actors interact with the public, music, movement and a set design that uses various organic, industrial and technological materials.

The style of their work has not been exempt from controversy. Some critics have criticized their certain inability to arouse positive feelings that go beyond the elementary sensations that spectacularity generates. Despite the above, the company has presented productions such as Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which have generated an outstanding reception from the public.

Characterized by the aesthetics of cruelty. Battles, raw meat, violent use of machines. Birth, death, sex, food. Freedom for provocation and experimentation. Spectator participation and development of works in unconventional places. Balance between the popular and the sophisticated, the atavistic and the technological, the corporal and mechanical prostheses; carnality and mysticism; nature and artifice; rudeness and sophistication; primitivism and technology. Ambition and grandiosity in their macro shows, the human network, the human machine, the human gear, the human sphere. Great producer of dance and shows but preserving their essence, which has characterized them since they were a group of colleagues. «Their greatest contribution to opera has been in the visual. They have united the carnality of present and virtual bodies with hyper-sophisticated projections of an almost cinematic quality. From the beginning, La Fura has known how to discover the performative aspect of the digital”, points out Mercè Gatell.

All these are characteristics, elements of the “Furero” language, its essence and evolution, its interior and its skeleton, whose pieces have come together over the years around a young, transgressive axis that seeks freedom, that is ambitious who wants to have fun, experiment and learn. La Fura has gone further and further for 40 years, expanding more and more, in terms of geography, stage space, number of participants, narrative and transcendence. From the car, the mule and the improvised theater parades in the streets of the small towns of Barcelona; even the macro shows, a benchmark in opera, the Barcelona Olympic Games, a ship-theater.

Jobs

Selection of shows.

Actions. 1983.

Shows elements that will be consolidated in the language of the training. Without a defined argument. Chain actions that combine music and performance. Actions start high but drop to viewer level. Putting a point of attention in the evolution of the actor.

Live music and synthesizers. The naked, the mud, the dirt, raw food. Destruction of two men in suits of a car. Pyrotechnic effects. Painting and food fights. On white walls, on canvas, using the architecture of space.

Suz/O/Suz. 1985.

Primordial man, play, discover, create myth and language. Man violated by self-awareness. Individual who has put matter at his service. The interpreters play with all the elements. With this they learn and create language and myth, overlapping the gods in this act. The rite.

Taking advantage of the architectural space of the room, the machines, cars, mobile platforms, bathtubs with wheels, and the layout of the public, and its transformation.

Tier Mon. 1988.

Evolution of the two previous shows. Consolidated language. A cycle with identifiable moments. Inevitable circularity of time. More elaborate dramaturgy.

Three characters: the white god, the useless and the dwarf. Individual, humanity, power, and their relationships. Confronted by the domination of characters that symbolize humanity. They establish a whole system of hierarchies within the show.

Mediterranean, Olympic Sea. 1992.

Opening ceremony of the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992. Macro spectacle seen by millions of people around the world.

It narrated the journey of Jason and the Argonauts to the end of the Mediterranean Sea, to the Pillars of Hercules, which according to classical mythology were the gate to the unknown world. In the course of the voyage that was represented in the Olympic Stadium, the Argonauts faced, in the best classical tradition, the furies that represented war, pollution, famine and disease: the furies of the first navigators have their equivalent current. The show culminated when Hercules, after crossing the enclosure, separated the columns and allowed the sea, made up of hundreds of people, to flow and flood the unknown, in a clear allegory of the encounter between cultures, races and peoples.

Revolution in the tradition that until then had defined the opening shows of the Olympic Games, mere evolutions of the masses, colorful and devoid of content, aesthetic and not very conceptually risky.

L'Atlantis. 1996.

Scenic Cantata La Antártida, by Manuel de Falla. Score that remained halfway after the composer's death, with defined and clear fragments and others only outlined.

Completed to order many years after his death. Coarse oratory that combines texts in Catalan from the homonymous work with other religious texts in Latin and Spanish. Rich symbology.

La Fura dels Baus proposes in its scenic adaptation a new plot line that has to do with its own adventures, that of the work, and with the meeting of three great creators, Falla, Verdaguer and Sert, who convinced the first of the need to give La Atlántida the character of a stage cantata and that he undertook to create the scenery that it should have at its premiere, but which he never managed to finish. Falla, Verdaguer and Sert appear in this Atlantis as three characters who attend the performance of their work while they develop it; who contemplate it while they create it, without being aware that they are trapped in it like the rest of the characters.

The Trojans. 2001.

Rereading the work of Euripides. With key elements of the language of the Fura. projections. Massive cast. Respecting original text. metallic elements. Mobile platforms. Water. Recognizable from the Fura.

Titus Andronicus tasting. 2010.

With this show they take up elements of their origins. Sharing space with the public, there is no stage, there is a difference in level, they allow the spectators to interact with the performers and vice versa. Constant encouragement for the public.

Works and their chronology.

Furian language shows

Among the "Furero" language shows we can mention:

Macro shows and special events

La Fura dels Baus has also starred in some macro-shows and special events, including:

Operas (stage performance)

They have also staged operas:

Theater

Among the shows conceived for theatrical stage are:

Cinema

For cinema, he has made:

• 1999: Goya in Bordeaux (dir: Carlos Saura)
• 2001: Fausto 5.0 (dir. Isidro Ortiz)

Discography

They have also released music in record format:

Other formats

• 2004-2007: Naumaquia (itinerant spectacle in the Norwegian Arold Cargue, converted in 2004 into the "Naumon", a center of performing arts floating.
• 2008: Adéu a la tele (exposition)
• 2008: The city invented (show program)