Edinburgh International Festival: Cinema on stage? Or plays with film projections? Chile's Teatro Cinema make neither of these, instead offering a genuine hybrid of two art forms

Published on Friday 26 March 2010 18:23

TO SAY I am late getting to see Sin Sangre is an understatement. It is the day when the first snow of the winter has fallen and the transport system has all but ground to a halt. My plane has sat for two-and-a-half hours on the Edinburgh runway and, by the time I get through passport control in Paris, the show has started. I arrive at the Théâtre des Abbesses, on one of the slippery streets of Montmartre, just as the final applause goes up.

The doors open and people start to leave, but entering the auditorium, I notice something odd. Many of the audience are still in their seats and gazing at the stage. I assume this is because they have been so moved by the performance they cannot bring themselves to go. But I realise later that is not quite right. They have stayed behind to figure out exactly what they have just been watching. Projected on a screen the full width of the stage are behind-the-scenes photographs that give clues about how the company, Chile's Teatro Cinema, have put the show together. These are what the audience are looking at and when I finally see the performance the following night, I can understand their bewilderment. Sin Sangre is unlike any play you have seen.

Or perhaps I should say it is unlike any movie you have seen. Because, as the name suggests, Teatro Cinema operate exactly on the border between two disciplines. It is too close a call to say whether you are watching cinematic theatre or theatrical cinema. It is both; a genuine hybrid.

"The words 'Teatro Cinema' define us," says director Juan Carlos Zagal over coffee next morning. "Most modern movies are about the possibility of travel. To travel inside the four walls of a theatre felt like being caged in. We felt the need to change time and space as quickly and as instantaneously as possible, like books, movies and comics do. That's what we're looking for in our new language. It's why we started mixing the techniques of movies and theatre."

To do that, he confines the playing area to a narrow oblong space, two metres in depth, in between two screens, the front one a transparent gauze. He projects pre-recorded film onto both screens, wrapping the actors in a celluloid world. They sometimes have real props, such as a table and chair, but more typically, their scenery – or set design – is created on film.

"It was really hard to imagine the performances with the videos," says actor Etienne Bobenrieth, recalling the early rehearsals when they would be performing in a vacuum. "We did it separately so we were really nervous when we combined the videos and the acting."

"Sin Sangre is a game," says Zagal, who remained confident the approach would work. "We're like big kids playing with screens and trying to tell a story with the use of many elements."

The technique does not stop there. Zagal uses the opportunity to conceive his production in cinematic terms, importing to the stage such movie staples as close-ups, alternative points of view, jump cuts and multiple images. Theatremakers have been employing film and video for many years – and elsewhere in this year's International Festival you will see multimedia trickery in shows such as the Wooster Group's Vieux Carr and Opra de Lyon's Porgy and Bess – but Teatro Cinema have pushed the idea further. The film is not merely an illustrative add-on, it is the main event.

"It's a very slow process, it's like the seasons of the year," says Zagal, whose biggest obstacle is the cost involved in filming. "We've played this show 200 times and we have the liberty of evolving the play, it's like editing a movie every day.

"We make the videos evolve as the actors and the performances evolve. As a company, we're searching for the impossible camera angles. The idea is to transport people and take them to impossible, fantastic things. If the audience believe us, we can talk about whatever we want."

All of this is fascinating, but it would be the end of the story if Zagal had nothing to say artistically. Sin Sangre (Without Blood) is an adaptation of a short novel by Alessandro Baricco, the author of Silk, which was made into a film with Keira Knightley, and Novecento, a monologue seen at the Edinburgh International Festival back in 2001.

It is set in the aftermath of an unnamed civil war, when the fighting is officially over but old scores have still to be settled. Three men arrive at a remote house on a mission to kill a former adversary. Years later, the dead man's daughter confronts one of his executioners, now an old man, but her attitude towards him has an unexpected twist.

Baricco wrote the book in Italy in 2002, but for Zagal, who grew up during the oppressive regime of General Pinochet, it spoke of the troubled history of his own country. "It's a really complex story in Chile," he says. "Sin Sangre is a reflection of Pinochet's dictatorship and the conflict in our society. It's the same thing that happens in many parts of the world in different ways and, in general, we try to be as universal as we can in our storytelling. Just as we don't want to be caged by the four walls of the theatre, we don't want to be caged by the frontiers of our country.

"Theatre plays are an encounter of free men to think and develop ideas without intervention or manipulation of any kind. We start from the silence, from the blackness, to tell profound human stories with the only intention of moving people and provoking emotions. In Pinochet's time, we didn't talk against the dictator, but we talked in favour of mankind, using all the creative elements that could give back the light, the emotion and the joy through fantastical stories."

There is a similar sense of imaginative escape in the company's latest show, The Man Who Fed Butterflies, the second of a planned trilogy that alternates with Sin Sangre in the festival. It tells a fantastical deathbed story of an old man who must nurture a freshly emerged swarm of butterflies to comply with an ancient ritual. To explain what it is all about, Zagal plugs in his laptop and shows me not a script but a storyboard. The illustrations are as carefully drawn as an outline for any Pixar animation, plotting the story frame by frame.

"In the script it is written whether it is film or an actor," says the director, who also acts and writes the music. "Here we're going from a world of fantasy to a real world, going back and forth constantly."

Where the company will go with the technique is unknown. It is as big an adventure for Zagal as it is for his audiences. For us, Sin Sangre is not the end of anything. In fact, it is the beginning, the beginning of a really long trip."

&#149 Teatro Cinema perform Sin Sangre on 28 and 30 August, and 1 & 3 September, and The Man Who Fed Butterflies, 29 August and 2 and 4 September at the King's Theatre.

&#149 Sponsored by Pinsent Masons.