Martin Zimmerman: "In the 80s there was more money than now, and possibly also more freedom"

BarcelonaSome time ago, the Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (Antwerp, 1976) took it for granted that he would not return to a stage. The artist set aside his role as a dancer and focused on creation, with works that have traveled around the world and moved thousands of spectators. In Catalonia, it has been possible to see, among others, Puz/zle (2013), Faun/Noetic (2024) and Ihsane (2024, just at the last Grec festival). In a meeting with the circus artist Martin Zimmermann, both began to reflect on the profession today, aging, and the fear of no longer being on stage. The conversation led to the need to create a show and the importance of Larbi also being present on stage. This is how Has been was conceived, which inaugurates the Temporada Alta festival this Sunday with a performance at the Municipal Theatre of Girona.

"Sidi Larbi didn't imagine himself returning to the stage, but I encouraged him. In the circus, clowns are wise characters, with a lot of experience, who know things. In dance, staying active is more difficult, because you need to have an athletic body," explains Zimmermann. Has been talks precisely about that, about how the passage of time affects artists and their bond with their vocation. "We are less physical now than when we were 30. We still have our bodies well present, but we feel that there are things we can no longer do," adds the artist. To explore these changes, on stage they imagine a diva (Cherkaoui) who lives in a mansion surrounded by solitude, accompanied only by a kind of butler (Zimmermann) who is, at the same time, his last fan.

The passage of time is made present through the mansion where the characters live, a house that begins to crack and fall to pieces as a symbol of the present. "What concerned us most was the distance between how things were thirty years ago and how they are now. What does it mean to be an artist today? What can we continue to explain? What does theater mean in a world of Instagram and instant images? All this was at the center of our debates," reflects Zimmermann. Among the changes that the artists have noted, and which appear on stage, there are two essential ones: the resources allocated to art and artistic freedom. "In the 80s there was more money than now, and possibly also more freedom," says the creator.

A period soundtrack

To travel back to their beginnings, Larbi and Zimmermann use a soundtrack made of songs from the 80s and 90s that three musicians (Alexandre Dai Castaing, Kaspy N’Dia and Kazutomi Tsuki Kozuki) perform live. "We are children of MTV, and that has given us a certain love for live shows," states Zimmermann, who adds that Has been is a piece of music and dance, but also of cabaret and, above all, with a lot of humor. The work also contains autobiographical parts, although the creators have dressed them in fiction. "We don't do documentary theater, but we do exaggerate and distort to present a show as something open to everyone," the artist clarifies. The performance in Girona will be the second stop on the international tour of Has been, which premiered in Belgium and will then pass through other European stages, including a performance in Seville.