With Sophie Calle's visual-conceptual work as a starting point, this is a performance with a vague theatricality, where both the narration of the failed love affair and the visual/sound journal of that trip to Japan unfold while the original text and the actual biography of the actress performing the text overlap. Japan is the landmark of that catastrophe. It is the crystallization of that catastrophe. It’s the name identifying it. Therefore, Japan’s imagery runs all throughout this kind of theater installation concept. The first part is a reconstruction of the artist's itinerary in Tokyo, where the strategy of simulacrum will lead the actress (as Calle’s alter ego) to mimic that same itinerary and document her journey with image and sound. The documentation of this simulation will enable the discourse of the second part. There, the performer lives through the narration of her own love-losing trip. She tells it back as many times as necessary -linking it with anguishing third person-stories- in order to exorcise the pain. Meant to follow-up a feminine perspective discourse that the pair Emilio García Wehbi - Maricel Álvarez initiated in 2005 staging Elfriede Jelinek’s Bambiland, here Exquisite Pain inquires on the boundaries between Real and Fictional, the actual and the apocryphal, pain and pleasure, all articulated through a heartbroken glance. This stage piece means a desperate attempt to soothe that woman’s pain, to turn all her anguish into an exquisite pain. Sophie Calle's aesthetic-conceptual strategies aim to the dilution of the notions of true and false, of experienced and imagined reality, and of the enigma of the Other. Thus, here this text runs through the discarnate soul of an actress constantly dwelling on her pain (which is not her own but at the same time it is). Her single standing presence onstage, and a monologue drive she craves to turn into dialogue, account for the procedures the French artist proposed, until they fade "in between", into a new entity, half truth and half lie, stitched up by the grieving souls of Sophie Calle, and Maricel Alvarez, as her alter ego.

With
MARICEL ALVAREZ

Actors on video
GUILLERMO ARENGO
BLAS ARRESE IGOR
POMPEYO AUDIVERT
CRISTINA BANEGAS
GABY FERRERO
PAULA ITURIZA
HORACIO MARASSI
JULIANA MURAS
OSMAR NUÑEZ
MARÍA ONETTO
ALBERTO SUÁREZ
DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ

Text
SOPHIE CALLE
Translation and version
RICARDO IBARLUCÍA
Dramaturgy
MARICEL ALVAREZ
EMILIO GARCÍA WEHBI
Production
CENTRO CULTURAL RICARDO ROJAS
EMBAJADA DE FRANCIA
FUNDACIÓN SZTERENFELD
FUNDACIÓN PROA
AIR FRANCE
TRAMANDO
INSTITUTO NACIONAL DEL TEATRO
PROTEATRO
Costumes
MARTÍN CHURBA
ANDREA SALTZMAN
Set
JUAN LÁZARO
Set building
ARIEL VACCARO
Lighting
ALEJANDRO LE ROUX
Music and sound
MARCELO MARTÍNEZ
Graphic design
LEANDRO IBARRA
Photography
EMILIO GARCÍA WEHBI
Executive production
MARICEL ALVAREZ
Assistant to the director
FELICITAS LUNA
JULIANA MURAS
Directed by
EMILIO GARCÍA WEHBI


Sala Beckett, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2008.

Fotos Emilio García Wehbi