Épica i Singular

Épica i Singular was born as an innovative employment project that proposes the reintegration of young people between 18 and 29 years of age through learning, the acquisition of new tools and skills applied to the development of collective work.

The project subsidized by the Employment Service of the Generalitat de Catalunya within the framework of the Youth Guarantee programs, has been developed in collaboration with La Fura dels Baus, the Fundació Laboral de la Construcció – Catalunya (FLC) – and the Institut Municipal de la Promoció de l’Ocupació (IMPO) del Ajuntament de Badalona. These entities come together with the aim of providing new training and employment opportunities to young people at risk of exclusion.

Épica i Singular offers two lines of work to respond to the needs of the young participants. The first one, which we can call occupation, consists of working on a series of professional skills and competences developing, among all the participants, a scenic and artistic project coordinated by La Fura dels Baus and other professionals. To this action, which tries to provide a more attractive and different way of working with young people, is added the learning of audiovisual techniques and construction specialties related to the show (vertical work, assembly of structures and scaffolding, etc.). It is in this last aspect that the FLC and the IMPO intervene mainly. Guidance and advice on job searching and contracts with companies for internships or hiring are other actions that this line of work will include.
The second, aimed at young entrepreneurs, offers a series of resources to facilitate the start-up of business and self-employment projects both in the so-called creative industries, construction or audiovisual activities, as well as in other sectors.

The first  days are devoted, above all, to working on group cohesion. Through disinhibition exercises and spatial work, students become aware of the group they are in, the space where they move and how they function in it. In addition, the history of La Fura dels Baus and its characteristic style are explained to them and they receive classes on social networks (Albert Claret) and production (Nadala Fernández).

During the second week, the students of Èpica i Singular shoot and present a spot related to transhumanism and evolution. They are asked to be synthetic, specific: putting ideas into images with very little time. In addition, the presentation must be innovative: play with images, find inspiration in unusual places, project on all kinds of surfaces…
They are divided into groups that are as heterogeneous as possible to facilitate the exchange of knowledge characteristic of Èpica, and they have five days to present, shoot, edit, and present their work. Finally, it is the whole class who jointly critiques the projects to assess whether the hypothetical client would have bought the product.

The third week of the workshop consists of giving students the necessary theoretical tools to start planning their final project. Through lighting, sound, editing, and stage language classes in general, the group develops skills that will help them build a show.
There are two topics proposed for them to work on: refugees and gender violence. Performing an abstraction of both in ideas such as death, anguish or the need to escape, the first final work projects are born. A work that, following the style of La Fura, transgresses the preconceived notions of classical scenic language.

After starting the week with rigging classes, the students of Èpica i Singular make their way to their final show. Based on the topics they discussed last week (refugees and gender violence) and divided into working groups, they explore not only what they want to do, but how to do it. This translation of ideas into action will be a fundamental part of the fourth week.

The final show is taking shape. Students continue to explore the transfer of ideas to matter, that constantly exchange on which any creative action is based. To do so, they have the help of a conference on Creativity by Rafa Montilla, who transmits to them in a more academic way the knowledge they have been acquiring during the previous days.

During the last week of this first phase of the workshop, all efforts are dedicated to polishing the final show as much as possible. The themes proposed in the third week, refugees and gender violence, continue to be the guiding threads of the show. The conditions in which a group of refugees finds themselves in a boat or the abuse suffered by a woman forced to marry will be some of the main scenes of the show.

Before doing the second and last performance of the workshop, the students of Èpica i Singular are divided to attend specialization courses in disciplines that will be useful to complete the workshop.
The Audiovisual course consists of giving the fundamental knowledge to make an audiovisual piece. From the script, audiovisual language, photography direction, editing, etc. Students must  write the  individual script for a short film and pitch it (defend it). The teachers choose two scripts to shoot and then edit. As there are twelve students, all will participate in the shorts with a specific position.
The teachers are Sara López and Marc Vendrell. In addition, there is the collaboration of other specialists to deal with specific issues; For example, Isaac Cañizares does a class on film analysis where “Jaws” (Jaws) is analyzed scene by scene and sometimes shot by shot. Quim Ribalta does an animation class, focusing on the stop-motion technique.

Before doing the second and last performance of the workshop, the students of Épica and Singular divide to attend specialization courses in disciplines that will be useful to complete the workshop.
The vertical and height work course is taught by the Fundación Laboral de la Construcción de Badalona Students gain technical construction related skills that can be applied in show business and will naturally come in handy in their final show. Vertical works, assembly of tubular structures and platforms, scaffolding, etc.
In addition, they take the Forklift Operator and Lifting Platform Operator course, obtaining their corresponding license upon completion.

The seventh week of Èpica i Singular corresponds to the beginning of the second joint part of the workshop. The students begin to propose a new final show, this time adapting the one they did in the first part of the course to a new space, expanding and improving it. New cohesion and concentration exercises are also carried out to unite the group after a few weeks outside the workshop.

The students, individually, make a show proposal and present it in front of the whole class. Based on the past workshop and the new ideas that emerged during the previous week, everyone reformulates the show as they see fit. This is how the ideas that can work best are chosen and combined again to arrive at a more solid and collectively decided show approach.

Once the plot and the main points of the new show have been decided, the Épica i Singular team gets to work assembling all the elements that will be necessary to carry it out. All the scenery used in the previous show must be reconstructed and adapted to the new space, as well as testing the new material and machinery.

During the tenth week, there is the collaboration of Mugaritz, experts in gastronomic creativity and culinary experimentation, and staff from both the Berklee College of Music  and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specialists in multidisciplinary technological exploration. Through the joint work between these two entities with Iglor and the rest of the Épica i singularteam, new ideas arise that can be included in the final show. The combination of technology, science and gastronomy with the performative dimension. Meanwhile, the show continues to take shape with the final assembly and consolidation of the script.
One of the notions that students must acquire during this collaboration, in addition to coming into contact with new forms of experimentation and concept development, is that ideas do not always come to fruition as initially proposed. It takes a lot of trying, rethinking, and turning around to make what you envisioned come true, and even then it may not be well received. Pioneers are always a few steps ahead of the rest; such is their luck and their misfortune. Sometimes, until years after an idea has been worked on, the public is not ready to understand it.

Week eleven corresponds to the final stretch of Èpica i Singular before its final show, the first general rehearsal of which will take place the following Wednesday. Thus, the assembly will be definitively finished, and there will be technical passes, movement tests and as many rehearsals as possible. Since this is a bigger show than the first part (both conceptually and physically), a lot of effort will go into making the show run smoothly on the outdoor location.

Six months of intensive work reach its culmination with the collectively created show about refugees and gender violence that had been brewing since the first weeks and has been magnified both physically and conceptually over the last few months. The public, who during the first minutes of the show will be led through spaces where samples of the work done by the students since the beginning of the workshop have been exhibited, will later be immersed in the journey of a group of refugees. The war, the flight from home and the trip in a boat will only be the beginning; They will then arrive in Europe, where the promise of all kinds of opportunities and comforts will prove to be just a hoax that will land them directly in a refugee camp. Next, one of the refugees will have the opportunity to become part of European society with a forced wedding that will lead her to suffer all kinds of abuse and culminate in the birth of an unwanted child. All this experience will have the participation of the public, which will follow the protagonists and interact with them. In short, a show in the purest style of La Fura dels Baus that demonstrates the learning acquired by the students during all these months.