In girum nocte
THROUGH THE WORK OF INGMAR BERGMAN
"I want to achieve a certain serene uniformity in which I do not need to resort to my tricks or my exacerbated ability to get solutions, at the same time I would like-above all-to work with images, without interruption with images. with these films based on the dialogue and it is very easy to place a dialogue ... "
To develop our work, we formally chose a staging based on the Circle (Islands) and the Straight (Bridges), isolating and trying to communicate the characters in their search for the Self.
We have renounced almost any textual, musical or choreographic support to be able to get closer to that electric current that runs through all of Bergman's work, and that, when the spectators approach, it also crosses our veins forever. Being the master of the text and the cinema, for us it is something else. He is the master of performance, of myth, of the collective unconscious. His art is physical, painful, radical and terribly contemporary and at the same time, primitive and shamanic.
Through it, we came to the world of myth, and from there, both collectively as well as ourselves.
The internal relationship of our work with the world that Bergman creates is immediate and unconscious. The rational comes much later. In Bergman, the here and now of the plane before the viewer, is pure unfiltered energy that runs through the body as a performative and direct scene interpreted half a meter from the spectator by the most gifted actor.
The structure of our work is based loosely on Passion (En Passion, 1969). Is the next:
0-PREAMBLE
The performers are born in a world of forms and rites that vanishes as soon as the first light gives a name and face to what surrounds them.
1-BREAKFAST
WITH TRIPOD
The performers, on their islands, do not try to communicate, just have breakfast placidly. They are observed and charged with guilt. The rest of people, already burdened with reality, force them to participate in it and thus, be guilty as well. The characters of Passion (En Passion, 1969), loaded with the past, are created.
2-RUNNERS ON
THE WATER
In the routine, day after day, the characters suffer and discover that isolation, like the character of Max Von Sydow, is impossible. They run on plastic doing the routines of the day, while the world interrupts them constantly to warn them that they will always be there. The cynical acceptance of that fact could keep them in that skeptical state in front of the human being (like the character of Erland Josephson), but the exhaustion of the interpreters will lead them to look for a higher level or an escape door.
3-WE ARE FLESH,
HEART AND DROPPERS
The performers recognize the time. They suffer interference with electrodes, as do those bombs cast in white of Shame (Skammen, 1968) or the asphyxiating melts of Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop, 1972). They scream desperately, exhausted, like the character of Max Von Sydow in Passion, when lying in his cell.
4-RECOGNITION
AND DOLLS
The performers are recognized a single moment behind their faces and then become puppets. In Cries and whispers, the dying Harriet Andersson remembers herself as a daughter, caresses the face of her distant mother, and from the eternity of the moment, they recognize each other.
5-BREAKFAST
WITH BERGMAN
The performers have breakfast in an attempt of a couple that may save them, although, clearly, each of them is imprisoned in their own being, it will not be possible. The staging explicitly pays tribute to the choreographed breakfast between Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow in Passion (one of the most beautiful breakfasts in Bergman's cinematography.)
6-MASK WHEEL
The performers try to live their characters and participate with the characteristics of these in the world that surrounds them and sometimes suffocates them. (Like the Passion characters, they try to be lovers, husbands, hermits, cynics, or just something similar to what they think a person can be.) Like the husbands and women of Cries and Whispers that appear one by one in front of the maid to say goodbye, showing, as the only face, the mask of the character in which they have become, abandoning forever, the childhood home to which they no longer belong.) The performer, trying to be a character, feels a fear so terrible that it fails at the moment. The last character removes the mask and, already naked, is terrified perceiving the absence of his face.
An authentic mask that defines us, in particular in Person (Persona, 1966) or Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander, 1982) and in general, in all his work.
(There are only two stages, childhood and old age. The rest is passed in an instant with all its importance.We play roles, but sometimes the feeling escapes, finds a fissure and then, for a moment, connect with Magic.)
7-PLASTIC KISSES
The performers bind and try desperately to get closer to each other so that human contact gives them relief, even if it lasts only a moment. As the approach between Max Von Sydow and Bibi Andersson, although that redemption is impossible.
8-DREAMINNES
Sometimes, a gap in reality can connect us to the other world. Our characters move a few seconds to the rhythm of the music, barely touching, trying a communication process in that other world that reality, in this, denies them. In Passion Liv Ullmann pours a bowl of milk and the rite begins. A world of black background appears. Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow communicate for a few moments, their faces bathed in light on the black background. They do not touch. We return to reality immediately.
9-MELODIC
SUICIDE
The characters think of art and then of suicide as an exit. Our protagonist walks around the stage with a cabaret air, dresses in balloons that explode in her body with the sound of Bergman's red fades, before hanging herself.
10-MOLTEN
ICE
The performer is isolated from the world as the character of Max Von Sydow to try not to feel. We melt a block of ice on the scene to be able to approach us minimally to what is hidden under the human shell; liquid water that disappears like a small river that sometimes reaches the sea and others, evaporates.
11-DUEL FISH
The performer suffers the crisis and the beginning of the transformation.
12- MACABRE
DANCE
The performer is kidnapped and driven like a puppet to the world of Myth. On the way back, he is reborn and seeks.
13-RESURRECTION,
ETHER KISSES
The performers cling to the memories as Liv Ullmann's character. Our protagonist looks for his dead woman, although, until he realizes that he is really looking for him, he can not consider his salvation and the search for a God that may be in each one of us, and from there, in the rest.
14-WALKWAY AND ETHER
The authentic bridge is towards itself, but when it has already demolished it, the terror of nothingness is unbearable. The performers walk blindfolded, desperate and lonely, in a last search or flight as the character of Max Von Sydow runs at the end of Passion, through the cold rocks of Farö, with a desperate cry.