CRA’P Residents April to July 2025
AUTHORITY
On the stage are Toni Cots, an actor for the Nordic company Odin Teatret between 1975 and 1984, and Søren Evinson, a performer. Cots is alien to what the performance has set out for him, but he is unreservedly open to the indications of his young disciple. The interaction between the two becomes a game of trust and vulnerability that traverses the taboos on socio-affective behaviour that animate the current rhetoric of cures. Through the contact between master and disciple, Cots not only revives as an actor, but also gives himself over to the history of an art that abounds in manipulation, exploitation and psychic subjugation. Evinson, in turn, supplants the master to achieve the level of amorality, passion and arrogance that is inextricably functional in the search for the beauty of the last century of theatrical creation.
Authority is a device that shows the actor’s infinite readiness to expose himself and the master’s charismatic tendency to manipulate. Both are capable of sacrificing themselves in order to comply with the decalogue of expressiveness and truth demanded, they are victims of themselves and have learned to be so by being victims of all their masters.
Founded in 1964, the Nordic company Odin Teatret is famous all over the world. Its founder, the Italian Eugenio Barba (1936), is considered one of the most innovative scenic personalities of modern theatre. Between last April and September, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge is showing the exhibition Self-Penetration. Eugenio Barba / Odin Teatret, which is dedicated to him and analyses the company’s activity between 1971 and 1979. It is curated by Roger Bernat. It is accompanied, this July, at the Centre de les Arts Lliures de la Fundació Joan Brossa, devoted to both visual and performing arts, by a second exhibition, this one of an oral nature. It is by the dramaturge Roberto Fratini with the title Autopsia (Autopsy). Finally, with the title Authority, Roger Bernat himself, Toni Cots and the performer Søren Evinson trace the arc that separates three generations dedicated to theatre.
This first collaboration between La Virreina Centre de la Imatge and the Grec Festival of Barcelona has been undertaken by Roger Bernat, an artist who made his debut at the Grec in 1997 and has already made seven appearances at the festival so far. Bernat is the author of productions such as Numax-Fagor-plus (Grec 2014), Not registered conversations of interest (Grec 2017) or Flan (Grec 2019). He has as his partners Toni Cots, dramaturge and performer of the show Grand Écart premiered at the Grec 2002, and Søren Evinson, author, director and performer who has already brought to the Grec 2019 the show A Nation is Born in Me.