Baro d’evel’s ‘Là’ at Romaeuropa Festival 2020

From October 7 to 10, 2020, the company Baro d’evel, founded by Camille Decourtye and Blaï Mateu Trias, performed 'Là' at Teatro Argentina in Rome as part of the 35th Romaeuropa Festival. The piece is the first part of the diptych 'Là, sur la falaise' launched in 2018. Featuring the couple's daughter Rita Mateu Decourtye, the performance explores tension toward an elsewhere, crossing emptiness and white space to reach a place beyond the wall where all possibilities exist. The action is driven by rupture and encounter, with the two protagonists emerging from the white stage walls, questioning, supporting, interrupting each other, exploding into desperate vocalizations, and collapsing. A tangle of threads imprisons the performer, and direct questions are posed to the audience. The work incorporates dance, song, theater, circus, and drawing, including Camille Decourtye's rendition of Bellini's 'I Capuleti e i Montecchi' aria and Blaï Mateu Trias's dense dance movements. The three walls of the stage bear traces of backs, steps, gestures, words, runs, and chases as signs of a reality and art that is never less ephemeral. The festival was interrupted weeks earlier due to new anti-COVID regulations. The performance reflects on distance, emptiness, loss, and the encounter that only theater offered as a last bastion of possible contact.