Falaise is the second half of a diptych by excellent French/Catalan troupe Baró d’evel (Camille Decourtye and Blaï Mateu Trias). Under the overall title Là, sur la falaise, it offers an accomplished counterpoint to the first piece Là, a ‘flip side’ to the coin. Black and white are the set colours of choice, but Falaise paints instead a poetry of grey areas; of nuances rather than extremes. Movement and pace has a steadiness, a pliability. The stressful image of approaching a precipice or cliff edge (la falaise) is detoured by a topical humour that assuages the slapstick.
Scenographer Lluc Castells has constructed an urban setting illuminated to represent various stages of nighttime. It seems both primitive and contemporary: a cavernous quarry of slate rock industrially cut into apartment blocks. In an indoor/outdoor exchange of spaces, life teems behind slick façades, puncturing through with an unexpected escape: a runaway bride or a fur-coated celebrity kick their way out with the amplified rush of rubble and dust. Pigeons flap about dangerously, their potential splatter represented instead by designs evoking the primitive – a homage to Tàpies or Miró perhaps? – graffitied across the walls in white paint.
Serene, magical yet confident and earthy, Falaise proceeds in a series of almost didactic sketches, wandering off a bit in the middle, coming again into focus; always evading exuberance, melodrama or forced meaning. There is, however a distinct urgent – even political – message… for an effective lyrical transcription of the piece note the intervention of the Nick Cave song Mercy Seat.