It's not about theater, it's not about dance, it's not about performance. And above all, it's not a musical recital. A dramatized recital accompanied by audiovisual media?

Under the name of Mikel Ayerbe and Iñigo Astiz, who one Tuesday night filled up the bar Parral de Vitoria, the show was developed by Mikel Ayerbe and Iñigo Astiz from some poems of the book Also residues (Susa, 2012): Landfill.

Four chairs, a table, a bag full of dirt and a glass of wine. And bodies. They don't need anything else to stage the experiments and questions suggested by poems. To give body. The result is as expressive as simple, the size of Astiz’s poems; “no poetic flowering”, naked and beautiful.

Together with the readings, they represent on the stage the actions or situations suggested by the poems: from one in one or two, reciting one and interpreting the other – while Astiz recites the poem in the oratry Experiment geopagus l(ab), Ayerbe fills the mouth of earth – or alternating the voices of both. As a result, the echo of poems multiplies, sometimes highlighting the trends already seen on paper, and also, occasionally, with new nuances.

Death and pain are some of the axes of the poems that make up the show. However, humor also has its niche: they have been able to bring to the scene the subtle (self-)irony that Astiz hides in his poems and that opens through the smile.

The audiovisual works carried out by Hasier Goikolea and Iñigo Astiz also stand out. They enrich the show while offering a space to breathe a moment to speakers. The geo-domestic experiment performed from the activity that the poem reports in darkness deserves special mention: three people are asked to repeat the experiment of that poem – being at home, trying to close their eyes and remember their previous house – and the process is recorded. It becomes shocking to see the three “subjects” describing those real residues that the past has left them in the brain.

But the original text does not lose prominence and, in this sense, one cannot speak of Landfill without taking into account the long and anthological poem Euskal Herria (a la Ginsberg). Astiz speaks aloud to Euskal Herria, even through the voice of Ayerbe, intercalating personal confessions and reproaches and showing the contradictions generated by his land of origin (“Euskal Herria, what lie should I respect? / Who has your witness passed me?, Are you my lie?”).

All of these ingredients won the applause of those of us who fill the Parral, and they did it wisely. The spectacle is expected to be enjoyed shortly. To those who have not done so yet, I would say that it is worth testing the experiment. At least I, well-leveled and eager to reread the book, went home, although I cannot give flowers, with the certainty that the devoured land is not a sterile residue (I guess).