EUROPE ENDLESS is a stage adaptation of the dance film Europe Endless (2014) choreographed by Ana Cembrero and co-directed with Jorge Piquer. In both works, film and stage, she was inspired by the clichés of the Eurocrats and lifestyles of businessmen and lobbyists. In the stage version, she decided to focus on two characters of the film, two women, a Greek and a Spanish.
From a choreographic point of view, I created a specific movement vocabulary for the film that I continued to develop and expand for the stage version, inspired by everyday activities related to office work and the signs of power, tics and postures of politicians. For the stage version, I am using some images from the film integrated into the set design to contextualize the space or extend the stage area. For the same purpose I also used cameras and real time projections.
The stage adaptation incorporates real events of the current politics, treated with humour such as the scandal of the Mayor of Toronto Rob Ford. In this adaptation, the subtle humour and parody are new tools that emphasize the difference between the film and the stage version of Europe Endless.
The shredding machine, one of the objects-symbol of the film, is a metaphor of the destruction of the European Union by the high-level politicians, large corporations and lobbyists. In the stage version, this object comes to life as an automaton, becoming another character in the scene that reflects and accompanies the evolution of the other two characters, a move towards the grotesque and absurd.
Parts of the music for the stage piece are excerpts from the soundtrack of the film such as the sound environments and songs composed for the choreographies from the film that are also performed on stage. These parts contextualize the environment in which the characters move outside their office, their comfort zone.A second sound part is specifically created for this release, a soundtrack that accompanies the character’s transition to a climax of absurdity and chaos, with the legendary theme Sweet Dreams Are Made of This by Annie Lennox or the Hymn of the Eurovision contest, a fragment of Te Deum by Marc-Antoine Charpentier.
— Ana Cembrero Coca