El Conde de Torrefiel’s creations are undeniably etched into the depths of our retinas as part of our theatrical mindsets. Tanya Beyeler and Pablo Gisbert have always kept a very close eye on the transformations that are happening to our world, often before we have found the words to describe them. With this new piece they take another step in the same direction that they were heading with Una imagen interior, and invite us to stop looking, and to rub our eyes until everything becomes a blur.

We live in an era of visual excess and our relationship with images is increasingly toxic. As social networks, advertising and artificial intelligence churn out images like sausages, what sense does it make for theatre to contribute to this constant hypertrophy? Tanya is clear about this, “Giving in to this is suicide.” That’s why this piece drives home the need to flee from greasy surfaces and the stench of fried food to recover the essence of theatrical language: Time, words and presence. As Tanya concludes, “We need to generate conflict in the image from theatrical discourse in order to ponder what the theatre of the future should be like.”

La luz de un lago is sustained by the same tension between image and text that is so typical of the company, but it tries to blur what we see even more, making it so undefined that we search for the images that appear when we see nothing. It’s the sound that guides us gropingly. One by one, ghosts emerge like shadows from a movie projected inside our heads, a cascade of love stories that glimmer like drops of water on a lake, where the light loses its sparkle and radiance for an instant before disappearing forever. Like tears in the rain.

As Marta Azparren says in Cine ciego, we need to go on a visual strike. Other creators who would surely join us are Nilo Gallego (Orelles voladores), Jou Serra (Range in Between) and Norberto Llopis Segarra (La operación), whose pieces also flee from representation to become acts of radical imagination.