CINEASTAS Runs Now thru 2/21 at REDCAT

Mariano Pensotti's critically acclaimed Cineastas, described by The New York Times as "a marvel of theatrical wit and ingenuity," will be presented at REDCAT, CalArts' Downtown center for contemporary arts, today, February 12 to Sunday February 21, 2015.

Cineastas, a masterful work of inventive stagecraft and incisive writing, tells the story of four filmmakers in Buenos Aires who are each starting a new project, not knowing that the creative process will change their lives forever. Mario Pensotti's "filmic drama" is performed by a handful of actors seamlessly switching characters on an elaborate split-screen set that allows for fluid shifting between the characters' lives and the films being shot. This critically acclaimed conceptual collision of art and life ingeniously adapts cinematic techniques for the stage-flashback, montage, cross-cuts, voice-over-to tell compelling stories of love, loss, joy, and despair.

Pensotti asks: "Cinema, and art in general, is something that forms our personalities: We are what films, books, and television have made us to be. We are interested in exploring a particular facet of the complex relationship between fiction and reality: How do life and day-to-day experiences influence fiction and, above all, in which way has fiction then been the starting point from which our lives are constructed?

If people's pasts are built through stories, the present is built on fiction.Is there a kind of cinema that is ephemeral? Could something be built in theater that actually lasts?Are works of art time capsules that preserve our ephemeral lives for posterity, or are our lives actually the vehicles through which works of art become eternal? Do our fictions reflect the world, or is the world a distorted projection of our fictions?"

REDCAT introduced this virtuoso director to Los Angeles on his first US tour with El Pasado es un Animal Grotesco (The Past is a Grotesque Animal) in 2012. He returned to LA to participate in the 2013 RADAR LA International Festival of Contemporary Theater with the site-specific project Sometimes I Think, I Can See You, presented at the Grand Central Market. Since then, Pensotti has toured the world and proven that "he is a visionary with staying power in theater." - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Cineastas premiered in KunstenfestivaldesArts (Brussels) in 2013 and has toured to Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Hebbel Am Uffer (Berlin), Holland Festival (Amsterdam), Theaterformen (Hannover-Braunschweig), Festival d'Automne (Paris), Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires), El Cultural San Martin (Buenos Aires), Luminato Festival (Toronto), La Batie (Geneve), Noorderzon (Groningen), Kampnagel (Hamburg), and Zurcher Theater (Zurcher).