Terrorismo, intermedialidad y omnisciencia: Boris Godunov, un espectáculo de La Fura dels Baus

Abstract

In the show Boris Godunov, La FuradelsBaus revisits the October, 2002 hostage that was carried out in a Moscow theater by Chechen rebels. As in the historic episode, the public is assailed during the show by people (characters?) with weapons who initiate negotiations throughout the performance, to realize their political demands. In this reconstruction of an episode based on real events (but itself subject to political manipulation due to the mass media having covered the event and transmitting the information), the professionals of the fiction who are the artists of La Fura intend to question this reality and the way it passes through a web of mediations to reach each one of us. To this end, the show resorts to the intermediality, which allows it to increase the traditional scenic space of the play by including the area of the spectators, the wings and corridors of the theater, a television studio set…, and to multiply the levels of fiction, creating a healthy blurring between the domains of reality and fiction. So, live images and mediated statements get involved in the interplay between the actors and the public, multiplying points of view to make the ocularization – and thus the access to the truth – as completeas possible. This paper examines in what this research of zero focus by the recourse to the intermediality, which aims at the spectatorial omniscience, is put in the service of a political aim – that of warning against media manipulation –; it also questions, in this context, the function of the theater itself –can it for example, avoid the traps of television mediation?