“Jumping differentiates me from the dead/lengthening or not the nails,/ lengthening or not the hair./ Jump. The leap differentiates me./ Just jump.” The play Salto is part of a poem, a poetic monologue created in collaboration with Oier Guillan and Javi Barandiaran. The play tells us about the leaps that have to be given in life, because going out on stage is also jumping.

The limits between the character, the actor and the author of texts are diluted in this poetic and humorous monologue, to the point of confusing each other. “Inside a closed room we see a character talking with six mannequin heads, with a single obsession: Jumping differentiates me from the dead.” Under the character we sometimes feel the actor, who comes in and out of his skin, who questions the audience directly,” explains Oier Guillan, asked about the monologue’s content.

In life we have to make several jumps and the expressions of the jump can be varied. According to actor Javi Barandiaran, the monologue talks about “dreams, obsessions, cowardice, loneliness, impotence, madness, about me and about you.” “It is a subject that has been born of a very particular situation, and at the same time is very universal,” continued Oier Guillan. “Each of us felt like a leap in his life when we launched this project. But in the same way, anyone has always been faced with a decision that has set the course of their life, all or most of us have consciously made decisions. Jumps can be personal or given by a group society” says the author of the text.

Contacts between the two creators

Although Pako Revuelta and Idoia Beratarbide have participated in the art direction both in the props and in the selection of costumes, Salto is a play created jointly by Oier Guillan and Javi Barandiaran. However, “Pako, as indicated by his last name, has helped us turn the work, pushing us beyond the point where we arrived. Idoia Beratarbide has given a concrete and coherent aesthetic to this work, as we are people with little or no taste. And he has also given us ideas, as well as concretizing aesthetics,” Javi Barandiaran told us.

Javi Barandiaran considers that the creation process has been “quiet, very quiet”. For his part, Oier Guillan says: “quiet, but compact, like all processes. Javi and I have been working and collaborating for a long time – Gorria (2002), Eskubiko pareta (2003) or Poza (2012) and a lot of collaborations –. At a similar time we have come to this project.”

Both creators have reached the same point in this monologue, sharing their experience in the creative process. But where is the boundary between reality and fiction? What's more creative about Salto? “Everything and nothing. It's all because it's something we wanted to do, and so it's ours. Nothing, because in the theatre everything is invented or said, and in addition, we do not want to invent anything or say anything new, or we do want but we cannot, and therefore it is not ours” says the actress. “It’s very personal, because by writing and creating our projects we are fully involved in what we say. It’s also theater, play; absurd humor and poetry can become artifacts, and yet they’re very ours.”

Humor and poetics are the ingredients of this contemporary theater monologue. Humor and contemporaneity have never had a close relationship. “It’s hard to laugh and get a serious touch of contemporaneity,” Guillan said. However, Barandiaran does not share: “Humor, in theater, doesn’t have to be a comedy club, humor is a very serious thing. We do not seek that ‘contemporaneity’. Our work is contemporary to the extent that we are alive, but it can be classic, or old-fashioned. In any case, if we had to choose between contemporaneity and humor, we would choose humor”.

Asked about the complexity of the text to Barandiaran, he explains the following: “There is text and there is an actor who is struggling with it. From that struggle arises a character that plays, all of it is cooked in an aesthetic salsa and served”. He is not a complex monologue, he assures us that “it is very basic, because we are basic. Therefore, any basic person can understand what we are talking about and some will find that we are talking about themselves.” Guillan stressed that “the monologue has a lot of humor and a lot of poetics. It's nothing complex. In the tests we have done so far with small audiences, we have seen that each one leads to reflection on their own jumps and, in addition, people do very well. I have always been very interested in experimenting with poetic monologues when it comes to the text; in this case I have been able to see the way that such a type of text can take. In short, a text such as this can give the opportunity to bring much of its experience to the actor and the public”.

The première will be held on 12 October at the Pasaia Theatre Conference, which will be held on 23 October at the BAD Bilbao festival. The two creators are eager to show the public “how they take things to stop suffering once and for all, or to start suffering differently,” says Barandiaran. Guillano has also had a final word about the time to take him to the stage: “I’m also looking forward to teaching it to the audience, but to end enjoying, or to start enjoying differently. Fundamentally, because going out to the public is jumping.”