Stratagemmi 46 – Il plastico in scena: la svolta di Agrupación Señor Serrano nel “reality trend” europeo – Riccardo Corcione

The model on stage: Agrupación Señor Serrano’s breakthrough in the European “reality trend”

The advent of live cinema in the theatre has brought the scale model on stage thanks to cameras and screens that multiply the audience’s gaze. The model not only holds the status of stage object and set design, but also inaugurates new dramaturgies by making virtual life and physical life coexist. This is why in the 2000s many companies of the so- called ‘reality trend’ started to make use of it on stage, mainly in the field of documentary theatre. The company Hotel Modern, which first systematically filled the stage space with the mock-up, explored a new relationship with the spectator through historical re-enactments between film and theatre. It is above all the Catalan Agrupación Señor Serrano that has inaugurated a new use of the model on stage. In shows such as A house in Asia (2014) and Birdie (2016), the relationship between camera and models founds a performative act that does not reproduce reality but its multiple narratives, establishing an ironic and intense dialogue with the spectator’s political, social and cultural imaginary and with the mass media and social network era. Video distortion and live manipulations make the projected set correspond less and less to the physical one. Watching has never been so unneutral.