El Pelele

A god is travelling through the mountains. He is blind and will not let himself see. His guide would like to move away from the ridge for one or two nights and try his luck in the valley. Would he like to meet up with fellow beings? "Not humans, but lottery stands, lights and dances - yes!" As they climb downward, leaving the legendary heights behind, El Pelele, known as "El", known as "Pedro", moves into our world and time - contemporary Spain, secretly transfigured by the hazy light of fable, as if the giant still on the mountainside were contemplating the country in a dream before resuming his walk towards the rising sun. In this land, hospitality, if not under threat, is as simple and silent as a gesture with the hand. Here, the rich man of yesteryear speaks of his youth to the man who has always been poor; the travelling show man and gypsy swap the latest news about the rough characters from the wash-house who, so it is said, have set off to hunt down a giant caught beneath Hanging Donkey Rock. El Pelele has the simplicity of a tale and the fleeting ambiguity of a dream. The tale confronts us with the meaning of childhood, but a harsh childhood with no illusions, which needs to be fed and awakened, again and forever, as we suspend set ideas, as if opening a door. The dream appears with the capriciousness and discretion of a carefully improvised tune, haunted perhaps by a distant echo of Peer Gynt or Pinocchio. The world rises to higher points, breathing freer, ever more rarefied air. After the Cepheids, first performed at the 1983 Festival d'Avignon, Jean-Christophe Bailly has been casting his poems for theatre in the direction of Georges Lavaudant, and from ever greater distances, offering, as it were, friendly challenges or "wild parades", leaving him to find the key to these poems interwoven with voices, memories, mysterious silhouettes and allusions to the path they have travelled together across contemporary stages. El Pelele marks the twentieth anniversary of their friendship in the arts.