I have no name
by El Conde de Torrefiel
 
Project and Production: El Conde de Torrefiel, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne
  
Creation: May 2023
 
Shared Landscapes is a project by Caroline Barneaud and Stefan Kaegi, bringing together seven artistic works by Chiara Bersani and Marco D’Agostin, El Conde de Torrefiel, Sofia Dias and Vítor Roriz, Begüm Erciyas and Daniel Kötter, Stefan Kaegi, Ari Benjamin and Émilie Rousset, for a day of performative land art.
 
A Performing Landscape project – Production:
Rimini Apparat, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, Bunker and Mladi Levi Festival, Culturgest, Festival d’Avignon, Tangente St. Pölten – Festival für Gegenwartskultur, Temporada Alta, Zona K and Piccolo Teatro di Milano Teatro d’Europa, and co-funded by the European Union. With the Berliner Festspiele.

Director’ s note
by El Conde de Torrefiel  
 
El Conde de Torrefiel is a theatre company that studies and explores the theatrical domain, with a clear scientific mission seeking to revise, update and widen the possibilities of theatre language. Its approach is characterised by an open-mindedness that answers to the existential circumstances of our time. However, when we began working as a professional theatre company in 2010, the productions of El Conde de Torrefiel were designed for a traditional theatre space: the “black box” and the forward-facing arrangement of the audience in their rows of seats.
 
But since the COVID-19 sanitary crisis of 2020, which radically modified social customs around the world, this dynamic has changed, including the relationship the audience has with the theatre. The prolonged restrictions and the physical and psychological effects of the pandemic made us reconsider our relationships, not only between humans, but also with the natural environment and the living world in a more general sense. From that point onwards, our practice of theatre started to explore (and you could even say recuperate) strategies that included the natural environment as part of its context. The invitation to participate in the “Shared Landscapes” project was the ideal opportunity to further examine these ideas, considerations and theatrical forms, which we began to put into practice in 2021.
 
With hindsight, our desire to leave behind the constraints imposed by a building and the theatre institution seem a natural step in our quest to enlarge the theatrical language, a sort of human expression designed to create fictions that allow us to come together, tell each other stories and imagine a shared future. At the same time, this “starting point” of the modern theatre space is also a way of reviving the origins of theatre as we understand it in the West, when performances took place outdoors, using the natural elements as the set and backdrop.
 
Occupying the natural space has allowed us not only to explore its possibilities as a stage and a fictional element but also to create a physical and powerful experience for the audience. Today, after centuries of consuming theatre in enclosed spaces that isolate us from the outside world and limit the gaze to one fixed point, this experience of nature confronts the audience with a form of active participation, visceral and engaged with reality and its dialectical and complex relationship with fiction and the collective imagination.
 
In our proposition for No tengo nombre / I have no name, the idea of a theatre experience whose premise is nature and the landscape (which, in our proposition, was not only the theme, but also the scenography and more importantly, the main character of the text projected onto an LED screen) corresponds with our need to question the present, as well as the future challenges awaiting the human species. In order to survive, we must find a balance and an exchange between our technological progress and our original configuration, thereby reaching a form of coexistence.
This is, perhaps, the most urgent existential issue we have before us.

El Conde de Torrefiel
El Conde de Torrefiel is a Barcelona-based duo comprising Tanya Beyeler and Pablo Gisbert. El Conde de Torrefiel seeks to understand the existing connections between rationality and the meaning of things established by language, as well as abstract concepts, the collective imagination and symbolism relating to images. Their creations aim to create a visual and textual aesthetic where theatre, choreography, visual arts and literature coexist, focusing currently on the 21st century and the existing relationships between the private and the political. Their theatre reconstructs the fourth wall, allowing a return to sensuality through the notion of a space: their goal is not to touch the viewers directly but to arouse their curiosity, transforming them into active witnesses, conscious of what they receive and remaining as close as possible to their feelings and impressions. The duo’s theatre practice reports on the contemporary world but does not produce dogmatic ideas or political analysis, since, according to them, “theatre should not close itself off by stating, but open itself up by questioning.” This is a theatre of emotion, poetry and the present, where subjectivities can exist freely in opposition to the demanding ambiguity of our contemporary collective life. At Vidy, they have presented La posibilidad que desaparece frente al paisaje (Possibility that disappears faced with the landscape) in 2016, La Plaza in 2018, and in 2023 they were part of the Shared Landscapes project. In 2025 they will present Ultraficcion N1.