The clown Pepa Plana begins an “exodus with return” towards Cirque du Soleil

Plana will travel to Montreal in September and join the circus in January 2012 to create his part in the show, of which he will be the central theme.

In September he will begin to “plan the improvisations” of his new creation in Montreal, home of the great circus, where 3,000 people work, not counting the artists, and then he will become part of “the 500 families that tour with the circus.”

Plana takes on the Soleil adventure “with a desire to learn, to share, it’s a very big boat with a lot of people rowing, I won’t row alone. Knowing that every night there are 2,000 spectators on the track makes me a little dizzy.”

He joins to “create a new show, they give me a lot of leeway”, in a clown duo, alongside Montreal clown Natalie Claude, with a premiere scheduled for April and a subsequent tour of Canada, the United States and Asia.

Meanwhile, in what is left of this year, he is preparing new tours with his company and will perform in Verscio, in Italian Switzerland, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Menorca, Pamplona and other Spanish cities, where he will perform “Giulietta, L’Atzar i Penélope”, his latest show prepared and directed by the prestigious Australian clown Nola Rae, the clown who put a red nose in her productions of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare and Napoleon.

According to Plana, “those of us who have a lot of work can amplify the difficulties of the sector. There are people with brutal talent who are doing things with zero resources, it is much easier to work outside.”

“You knock on doors that don’t open and we have the right to perform in big houses like the Lliure or the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya -says the Catalan clown-, and with these Cirque Soleil offers me a creation, without any casting or having asked for it and I’m delighted with life, no one has offered it to me here.”

He rests for a few days at his new residence in Sant Jaume d’Enveja (Tarragona), a former 2,000 m2 chicken farm. And there, protected by the Ebro Delta, the artist reflects on his future while restoring an antique piece of furniture and ponders the project of turning the farm into a center for creation and meeting of artists.

Plana believes that in Chile, Ecuador, Colombia or wherever “Everyone laughs the same” and sometimes “here you go from one place to another and even to the same room and at the same time and the audience has nothing to do with it”.

“The clown listens a lot to the audience, he has them in front of him, he asks permission… ‘hello can I come in’, what he wants is to have a good time first, then he jumps into the pool, he listens a lot and sees what kind of audience he has in front of him, he asks for complicity,” explains the clown.

According to Plana, the humor that the clown makes “is very fragile, very small and the codes are universal, for example, to denounce a war kill a fly; we use these codes and so everyone understands it, whether you are in Africa, Latin America or China. They call us poets in action because we seek the essence of nonsense, the infinitesimal”.

After his exodus to the other side of the world, he plans to reprise “Èxode”, a show in which he forms a trio with Monty and Nan Valentí, inspired by the exodus of the Spanish Civil War.

ABC.es