Easy Rider reflects upon faith, tradition and delusion. Eva Recacha looks at the human compulsion to engage with superstitious beliefs and practices in the pursuit of happiness. Creating a concoction of religion, customs and self-help manuals.
In Easy Rider, Eva draws on first-hand observations of ritualistic behaviour in her native Spain. Much like her Place Prize Finals 2013 piece, Easy Rider is a theatrical rite, an unraveling of the pure essence of our need to belong. It reflects our own beliefs and passions in a raw and haunting way.
Press:
Conviction and Daring in Eva Recacha’s Easy Rider by John O’Dywer
(…) Recacha’s piece (which opened this year’s Spring Loaded season at The Place) is concerned with faith and superstition and ‘our need to belong’. Its simple stage properties (yellow towel, a pair of gold or of black, sequinned trousers) are combined with carefully composed sound and lighting (Jackie Shemesh) to create the atmosphere of a bullfight, a Holy Week procession (Antonio de la Fe holds his body as rigidly as the figure on a crucifix), a confessional reality-TV show. Spanish-born Recacha also uses the spoken word, but the performers are not slickly wired; they hold their microphones for themselves and for each other. What they say is not slick, either. Sometimes they engage in a dialogue with their own recorded voices. Sometimes they speak to the voice of a disembodied woman. Sometimes they speak to each other. What they speak about is love. (…) Almost naked, they soon afterwards embark on a rave-like frenzy that verges on the dangerous (bottles of water are thrown; Sikorski crawls underneath the sound deck). It leaves them lying on the floor and most of the audience at The Place open-mouthed in admiration and surprise.
Production Credits:
Coreography: Eva Recacha in collaboration with Antonio de la Fe, Eleanor Sikorski and Lola Maury
Sound design: Alberto Ruiz Soler
Lighting Design: Jackie Shemesh
Set and Costume design: KASPERSHOPHIE
Performance: Antonio de la Fe, Lola Maury, Eleanor Sikorski
Co-writers: Antonio de la Fe, Lola Maury, Eleanor Sikorski, Eva Recacha
Dramaturgical support: Simon Ellis
Production Manager: Marco Cifre
Producer: Eva Recacha