References, debts, homages, quotes, copies, plagiarism, remixes, cut-and-paste… Culture is always the result of mixtures, rewritings, contaminations and updates. Ideas appear and reappear again and again over time. Contexts and circumstances change and, with them, readings and interpretations.
All of this is what Falsestuff is about, the play, written, directed and performed (among others) by the Nao Albet / Marcel Borràs duo and presented at the Grec Festival last summer. Starting from the idea of falsehood and authenticity in art/theater, it speaks of the fine line that separates the quote, homage and plagiarism and the complexity of the concept of authorship: Roland Barthes’ idea that a text does not belong to its author, but to culture and readers. In a game of formats and a dizzying pace, Falsestuff is not a typical play. In fact, it is several plays in one. It is Central European theatre, it is a comedy of art, it is a Western, it is silent film, it is music, it is a performance, it is a post-show discussion, it is a concert, it is a live performance, it is Tarantino, it is Falstaff and also falsestuff. It is, of course, F for Fake, the documentary about Orson Welles’ fraud and forgeries.
Pedro Azara (incidentally, curator of the Catalan Pavilion at the next edition of the Venice Biennale) explains in the post-show discussion (actually a theatrical discussion during the intermission of the performance) that in the past, copies of the most important archaeological discoveries were usually made, and it was these copies that were exhibited. In Falsestuff, the protagonist, André Féikiévich, is so methodical in his falsification of works of art that he needs to capture their essence in order to be able to falsify them. It is not strange that he sets himself new challenges and moves on to the falsification of plays. Is it possible to falsify plays? The actors, the company, even their behaviour in private? Does this meticulous reconstruction make sense? And from there, to the next question is a step: does the enormous effort that creation sometimes implies make sense? If we follow this line of thought, we go through the “uselessness” of art, the unproductive efforts and the “I would rather not do it” of Bartleby and of all the “artists of no”…
Tricks, fraud, lies. “Who cares about the facts?” asks Orson Welles in F for Fake. “Art is a lie that allows us to see the truth,” as Picasso said, as Welles says, as Féikiévich says, as Albet/Borràs say.
It is time to rethink formats. Or to have them all present and mix them. It is the cut-and-paste of Burroughs and also that of Bowie. Hybrids and transdisciplinarity as a conceptual decision. Being free to be able to move between ideas, formats and references. Be free to not be afraid of the weight of the past and also to not take yourself too seriously.
[Article published in Bonart, 2018]
