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LA FURA 1. La Fura dels Baus 1.1. Pluriartistic creation The progressive extension of the theatre-form after its conceptual and formal crisis in the 70s, increased by the subsequent postmodern spectacularization of the stage and the culture during the 80s, has influenced a society in which performance, in the face of constant surprise and television present, is no longer an static and ordered view of the environment. Therefore modern sensibility requires a complex interaction of forces, a constellation of events, structure dynamism. Nowadays, the indeterminate, the likely, the many-sided have also invaded the stage, taking it away from unit-rules and the conclusive endings characteristic of Aristotelian dramatics. A spectacular image is asked for, which theatre sensitivity has not fully adopted, since historical inertia and the weight of dramatic conventions mean that it lags behind technological acquisition, and also in relation to theoretical speculations contributed by physics or philosophy. To this effect, La Fura dels Baus is a pioneer collective on the international level, assimilating and projecting this new drama/spectacularity, both in their work methods and their staging. Because at the end of the 20th century some concepts such as the armoured individuality of the artist or the idea of finish and masterwork may be outdated. The new sensitivity, the perception born from zapping appears ravenous for stimuli and highly able to read a computerized and changing grammar, characteristic of our time. As a result, pluriartistic experiences and creations have become increasingly important in stage disciplines (up to now) specialized and labelled according to genre: theatre, dance, circus, opera, performance, ephemeral architecture… The impossibility of a unitary reality in our time has become tangible, and really contemporary dramatic representation reflects it. Thus the borders dividing performing arts vanish as contemporary stage creators, who use technology and media environment as artistic languages and not as auxiliary tools, act as generators and/or intermediaries of creative processes and not as artisans.
La Fura dels Baus creates, coordinates and catalyses events that may be shown in different formats (theatre productions, opera productions, Olympic ceremonies, advertising productions or hybrid forms such as planetary rave parties or other high-voltage technology performances). When we talk about La Fura dels Baus we refer to a new kind of stage creator that results in new forms of dramatic creativity which, sometimes, go beyond traditional limits. The contemporary stage must be a polysensory and pluriartistic expression. It will be useful to deny the contamination and analogies between cinema, town planning, psychoanalysis, anthropology, rock, plastic arts, sociology, advertising, sport, television… and the contemporary stage. As a result, contemporary theatre has become part of the polysensory environments guessed by the avant-gardes that at the beginning of the century dreamed about global stage expressions (Wagner, Appia, Craig, Schlemmer, Artaud…); a path followed again in the sixties with the explosion of Performance and other experimental proposals that moved away from established stage hierarchies. Traditional frames had been transgressed. Mercè SaumellLecturer at the Institut del Teatre (Barcelona) and the Universitat de Girona 1.2. Mutations La Fura dels Baus works in the field of pluriartistic creation, which crystallizes along its seventeen year old group biography, a life process parallel to a clear evolution of its collective creation principle. From a compact creative core characterized by its rubbing method and from which seven founder members remain, the individuals that form La Fura dels Baus have extended this method towards other artists, with whom they collaborate usually or occasionally, that have substantially enlarged the plastic, musical and/or technological registers of the group by means of a fruitful mutual contamination principle. On the other hand, the language and aesthetics of La Fura dels Baus, brewed in their life course and exemplified in a great number of occasions, retains some defined and defining structural properties: performing space shared with the audience, use of perishable material (water, fire, earth, pigments, entrails, objectual corpses…), an anti-naturalistic acting model, musical syntax, the latest technology, inclusion of extratheatrical elements… Thus they confirm an aesthetic that is both consolidated and able to successively modify itself. But the well-established existence of this Furero language is precisely what makes it possible to coordinate alternative interpretations or shifting perspectives so that in each of the projects of the collective, an individual from La Fura dels Baus becomes responsible for it, within a process creative independence agreed on and "rubbed" by the collective. Therefore, the products from La Fura dels Baus are not only distinguished by their more or less defined content or genre (opera, Olympic ceremony, theatre performance…) but by means of common communicative structures that shape the Fura style mentioned before, which we could broadly outline as Rituality, Transgression and Diversification. This same diversification principle has always been present in La Fura dels Baus, which has proclaimed itself a multidisciplinar group ever since its origin as a theatre-music cooperative. Besides, individual actions such as concerts, exhibitions, performances, records or videos received the generic name of "satellites" at the moment, a name pointing at their location towards the creative axis of the group: stage production. Later, from 1991 onwards, the group continued this transforming process by means of its subsidiary La Baus Fundició, which generated many interdisciplinary, and often multinational, projects, in which the collective integrated other creators -close collaborators, decisive in the development of La Fura itself. So, since its creation, La Baus Fundició welcomed many initiatives and actions, from the Krab band to the celebrated Barcelona´92 Olympic ceremony. This may be considered an interim period of change, in which theatre productions were still considered the creative matrix or centre of the collective. At the moment this centre has not shifted, but has diversified in a multiple birth of other centres in a kind of group mitosis from the original nucleus. The idea of La Baus Fundició has been absorbed by the present concept of La Fura dels Baus, organically and according to the progression, both individual and collective, of its members.
As in the case of cellular mutation, in which the alterations caused by splitting genes cause information transmission, the present expansion of the group means a diversification/multiplication in the work, either dual or individual, retaining the heritage of Fura language. And this present diversification is what allows La Fura dels Baus to work on different projects at the same time, materializing ideas accumulated in recent years, large commissions or collaborations with other groups. Mercè SaumellLecturer at the Institut del Teatre (Barcelona) and the Universitat de Girona |