Señor Serrano in Conversation: Inside the World of Birdie
Versión en español aquí
For the past two decades, the theatre company Señor Serrano has explored the intersection of theatre, cinema, and technology. Their acclaimed production Birdie, integrates live cameras, scale models, and a precise choreographic system that constructs a film in real-time. Since its premiere in 2015, the work has remained a timely reflection on the issue of migration. MCR spoke with the founder of the company, Àlex Serrano, ahead of their presentation at OZ Arts on January 30 and 31, to delve into the innovative language of the piece and its staging.
Angélica Trujillo [AT]: Birdie proposes a scenic device that operates as a live audiovisual laboratory. Do you consider your work to exist within a hybrid territory between the performing arts and cinema?
Àlex Serrano [AS]: We say that we make contemporary theatre, but we also say that we make cinema in real time. We like to think that everything that happens in a theatre with the intention of being theatre is theatre, and that therefore it belongs to a living art form which, unlike cinema — which is not present in the same moment — does not share time with the spectator. We, on the other hand, are sharing the same time and the same space as the spectator, but using a technology or a language that at times comes closer to, or becomes hybridized with, cinema rather than with what we consider classical theatre or traditional realist theatre.
[AT]: How did this aesthetic decision emerge? Does it respond mainly to a conceptual search within contemporary theatre, or also to practical issues related to scenic construction?
[AS]: It is a mixture. Our company is twenty years old since it was founded, and already in 2010, with the crisis, we were forced to create very light theatre works, highly exportable, with a common language. A pop and audiovisual language, with little textual weight and a strong presence of shared references — that is what pop means — but also with a strong idea of metaphor or shared poetics, something I will mention later. In any case, it was also a decision to tour quickly, to tour internationally, and to remain light. For example, in this piece, Birdie, there are three of us on stage, and we travel with three suitcases containing all the scenography we need. Then, obviously, there are technical requirements related to theatre technology and standard elements, but no different from any other company.
[AT]: Although there is a structural script, does each performance allow some degree of flexibility or different decision-making depending on the space and the audience?
[AS]: Our works are like very precise small mechanisms, basically controlled by computers, cameras, and performers who operate these video cameras. Birdie is a piece that, from one place to another, has very few variations. When I say very few, I mean almost seconds — at most one or two minutes of difference. All the works function like a clock, although we like to think of them as choreographies. There is a lot of movement in these works: operators moving from one side to another, operating cameras, moving objects, and revealing different parts and different scales of the scenography. Everything operates as an extremely precise mechanism, and there is something very beautiful and almost perverse in this precision.
We are talking about a hard topic, a “peliagudo” topic, as we would say in Spain — a topic that raises blisters — but we approach it in an almost systematic and very precise way. We are men dressed in suits and ties, like office workers operating cameras, and somehow we remain distant from the subject matter through our precision, our cleanliness, and our choreographic fineness of movement. They are clocks.
[AT]: Birdie premiered more than a decade ago. Has the original approach of the piece been maintained, or have the issues it addresses needed to be transformed or intensified?
[AS]: Indeed, we premiered it about ten years ago — in July it will be ten — and, unfortunately, it is a piece that is still alive. We say unfortunately because the issue of migration, far from improving, has worsened greatly. We have not had to change absolutely any content of the piece, and that is basically because we do not work so much with current events, but with metaphors. We never speak of human migration, but of animal migration or the migration of commodities. We do this through metaphors: Hitchcock’s birds, the game of golf, the movement of golf, and of the birdie, which, as you know, is a stroke that means going one shot under par. This idea of working with distance, with metaphors, and through a distanced poetics has, I suppose, allowed the piece to remain current.
[AT]: The work raises global questions that can be interpreted in very different ways depending on cultural context. How do you construct a narrative capable of dialoguing with such diverse audiences without imposing a single reading?
[AS]: I think it has a lot to do with the decision the company made during the 2010 crisis: to address common themes and to do so using common languages. We realized that globalization created an audiovisual paradigm with very similar references for everyone. Elements such as the Gummy Bears, Marlon Brando, Michael Jackson, golf, or Indians and Cowboys — to cite some of the themes present in our works — were very common references for all of us and allowed us to dialogue from a shared space.
We like to say that we make a kind of hard pop. We choose those shared references from audiovisual pop culture, but we twist them, harden them, and modify their metaphors in order to create, from this common language, an alteration — an alteration that allows you to read, through metaphor, a little further. For that reason, the reception of our performances tends to be very similar in all the countries and environments where we have been, because, unfortunately, in the case of Birdie, migration is a very similar problem everywhere, whether you are a victim or an agent. It is a shared fact.
[AT]: As you circulate widely through international festivals and stages, have you ever felt institutional pressure to soften the discourse or make it more “exportable”?
I think this is an excellent question. We like to think that with this idea of hard pop we have a very sweet face, even a very submissive one, but that it functions like a kind of hard candy, where there is something very hard inside, something almost poisonous, that cannot be seen at first glance. We have not suffered censorship, but it is evident that there are festivals or countries that decide to program you or not to program you. There is something in curatorial or programming choices that already places you inside or outside. When a festival receives public or private funding, it faces greater or lesser constraints and therefore greater or lesser risk in receiving money depending on what it programs. We have indeed seen festivals tell us things like, “We would love to, but we can’t because of A, B, or C.” Censorship, although in the last year it has begun to change and to show itself in a harsher and more arrogant way with the new far-right governments, has traditionally operated in a more subtle way, softer, like a snake that hides and does not show its fangs.
[AT]: Ahead of your presentation in Nashville — a city emblematic of the musical richness of the United States — what place does sound construction occupy within a work that is fundamentally visual, like Birdie?
[AS]: We love to say that each of our touring pieces has a mood. In the case of Birdie, the mood is jazzy. It is a piece with a lot of music: a voice-over that narrates the piece in English, and a soundtrack composed specifically for it. It moves within jazz registers, with some touches that are sometimes ethnic. There is a soundtrack that accompanies us and, at certain moments, sinks the piece into darker spaces. Basically, it is a piece with a strong musical presence.
[AT]: Audiences in Nashville will have the opportunity to experience this live audiovisual setting firsthand. This is an invitation to witness cinema and theatre unfolding together in real time!
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