Don Quixote dominated the ballet schedules this summer, with three different productions parading the usual swaggering matadors, flirty Gypsies and dotty old knights. Mal Pelo's Atlas, however, provides a fascinating antidote to all that fake, gaudy Castilian colour. On an austere, empty stage there are just two characters, the Don (Pep Ramiz) and his sidekick Sancho Panza (Jordi Casanovas), and at first all that connects them to Cervantes' novel is the graphic contrast in their body language.
Ramiz, dressed in a tailored but slightly shabby suit, moves in a space of his own, his lean body stretched into fantastical attenuated shapes, his gaze wired up to some movie playing inside his head. Casanovas, in baggy T-shirt and jeans, is compact and grounded, his rolling gait, his blunt gestures denoting a comic, self-deprecating realist.
The fact that the two men are on a journey together is flagged by footage of electricity pylons glimpsed from a speeding train (the only windmill in sight is a wind turbine) but it is clear that their voyage is essentially internal.
Close to the beginning, Ramiz fondles Casanova's bullet-shaped head in the gesture of a tender, if distracted master. But, as the Don's visions become more crazed, culminating in a funny and disturbing war dance, the relationship shifts and Sancho ends up in the Don's role, riding on the latter's back as he shuffles off the stage on all fours, heading nowhere.
What anyone without a knowledge of Cervantes would make of Atlas is hard to guess. Yet the relationship it portrays between the two men may be all the more intense for its lack of an overt storyline. So intimately focussed are Ramiz and Casanovas on each other that they suck all the energy and oxygen of the theatre into the relationship. As a portrait of madness and mutual dependency it is oddly absorbing and unexpectedly affecting.
