i was sitting right in the middle of the front row
thinking about what a weird audience we had to be
would Cristina Blanco notice Dora was watching the piece
while listening to her Ipod?
how far was Ana prepared to go with being a pain in the ass, annoying the public?
in fact the situation was completely absurd!                                                                                                         french critic gérard mayen proposed some instructions to us                                                                                       one piece - cristina blanco's - but eleven different ways of looking at it                                                                    me i had to concentrate on the body
trying to forget about scenery, sound, etc                                                                                                          that's how eleven lunatics ended up in a small public of – how many? Thirty?
what a lack of responsibility on behalf of the jury!
if we had some authority before, it had to be gone by now
i was imagining Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker giving the award:
and the cucumber goes to....'MAMMA MIA'!
(luckily we saw the performance twice)
must say i had a hard time concentrating on the performer's body alone
trying to cut out all the rest
this had nothing to do with the audience business
because soon it didn't bother me no more
as i was sucked inside this bubble
of tensions, thoughts, perceptions, desires
that were moving, running fast, stumbling over each other
finally ending up in my little notebook or just slipping into oblivion
no it was difficult to stay focussed on her
first because she was so close – two meters or three?
and we as a public sat in the same light as the performer
so no way i could hide myself in that secure darkness of theatres
in which one can look, stare, sleep
without being troubled by feelings of fear or shame
second reason was that cristina blanco often turned her back on the public
not out of arrogance
but to focus our attention on the scenery
this distance i appreciated very much
for me the piece was smart and funny
but it didn't force to make me laugh through a sophisticated manipulation of the audience
a lot of stand-up comedians don't leave their spectators some free space of their own
with their face, their body and their voice
they build up everything rigidly towards little outbursts of laughter
cristina blanco's kind of neutral facial expressions and her monotone voice
indicated that this phantasy world she build up on stage
was not about her at all
how do signs rule our lives? do they form a language that's universally understood?
then how come their forms and meanings are so arbitrary?
what happens when you forget what you have been taught?
everything cristina blanco does
from the little salsa dance to the caricatural football scene
every absurd action stems from a highly new and original
or just an extremely literal interpretation of specific signs
cristina blanco shows there's a world of possibilities
behind the thin veil of what we call 'reality'
at the same time she seems to say:
signs rule our bodies, but without them we're lost