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Faust In Barcelona: Catalonia's La Fura Dels Baus, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

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 armillary 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 …