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Sharon G Feldman
Total darkness. Garbled electronic sounds gradually build into a thundering roar, reminiscent of a plane veering down the runway. An orgasmic explosion fills the theatre with a big bang and a sudden flash of light. Following the chaos, what emerges in the darkness is the phantasmal image of two rotating human heads fixed at opposite ends of a single body. It is Faust, fastened to a revolving metallic ''bed'' evocative of Leonardo da Vinci's armilary sphere. The heads spin like two satellites in a never-ending cosmic orbit, creating a subtle allusion to the Faust/Mephistopheles duality that later in the performance becomes more explicit. ''I am Faust,'' he groans, as he contemplates self-destruction. ''I am forty-seven years old, and I am tired ... of everything, tired, of life, of myself.... I know that I will never find happiness ... never be free! Nothing I know is of any value.''1
These are the opening moments of F[commat]ust versió 3.0, a contemporized version, or vision, of Goethe'stwo-part dramatic poem, conceived by the Catalan theatre company, La Fura dels Baus. In La Fura's modern-day recreation of Faust, the protagonist's dissatisfaction with life is tinged with shades of imminent millennarian catastrophism. His feelings of ennui and solitude derive from his growing frustration with the unremitting saturation of information that pervades our contemporary technological culture. Shortly after this initial scene, he is depicted alone at a computer in his study, bemoaning his isolation, traveling through cyberspace via the internet, when he inadvertently summons the presence of his antithetical double Mephistopheles, whose image appears on a large screen upstage. [Photo 1] Wagner, Faust's assistant, interrupts with a pizza.
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La Fura dels Baus emerged as a theatre collective in 1979 amid the...