CATALAN WAYS
Alfons Flores, a transglobal scenographer
Lluc Castells and Franc Aleu, shared projects
Opera calls on new spaces to express itself.
And this is exactly what Alfons Flores creates.
Invented worlds, universes ready to be shared with us, the 21st-century audience. They connect directly with our concerns, our anxieties, our fears…
Fiercely contemporary spaces to house the universal themes of classical operas and reveal them in a new light. Harsh or poetic, but never complacent. Spaces that spark questions in us, disturb us, hypnotise us.
Huge, overwhelming places. Enormous machines where the individual is often swallowed up by the group or the device.
Places like impassable mountains.
Franc Aleu’s projected images change the textures of the spaces. Sometimes they tell us other stories which overlap with the originals, and sometimes they transform them, burying them deep in the skin.
Lluc Castells’s costumes create characters, but above all groups. Individuals belong to communities. Communities are apparently uniform, but if you look carefully, each individual reveals small, distinctive differences. Costumes play a decisive part in the drama, sometimes integrated into a common proposal, sometimes suggesting another reading, another point of view.
Ignasi Cristià, scenographer and dramatist, accepts the challenge of making a scenography by scenographers. He designs a stand for Catalonia that invites us to come in to see the creative universes of these three artists.