El Malogrado
live at Teatro San Martín
Buenos Aires, Argentina
November, 2004

El Malogrado is Martin Bauer's theatrical adaptation of Thomas Bernhard's The Loser, featuring two performers playing Bauer's score and an actor in the role of Bernhard's Narrator.

Minou Maguna's stage design called for 3 channels of video to evoke the relationships between the 3 characters who meet while studying with Vladimir Horowitz. The Narrator and Wertheimer find their lives emptied of meaning once they hear Glenn Gould's brilliant interpretation of the Goldberg Variations and give up their lifelong obsession with the piano in deference to Gould's superior talent.

For El Malogrado I shot location footage with the team in Buenos Aires and the muddy Pampas outside the city. Image processing and compositing is used to evoke the three prodigies' personas. A custom MIDI system controls 3 laptops running GRID to perform the 3 channel video score. Other sections are performed by rescanning video feeds warped by the live music signal.

Based on the novel by Thomas Bernhard
Composed, written and directed by Martin Bauer
Pablo Ruiz: actor
Oscar Pizzo (Italia), Lucas Urdampilleta (Argentina): piano
Art Direction by Minou Maguna
Jorge Chikiar: sound design
video design and performance by Benton-C Bainbridge
text selection and actor direction by Héctor Díaz
Con el auspicio de la Fundación Antorchas



live doc cut (H.264 QT mov, 93 MB)