Sala-Manca Group presents in the frame of the series Something Different by the Jerusalem Foundation & Gerard Bechar Center: The Story of Batya M. — An original telenovela screening with life dubbing performance by Sala-Manca Group with the live music performance of Yarden Erez (composer of the film soundtrack) :: June 10, 2009; 9:00 pm :: Leo Model, Gerard Bechar, Jerusalem.

The Story of Batya M. is the last (and unique) chapter of a fictional Argentinean “telenovela” (soap opera) projected on the screen and experienced as live performance. In a live performance the two leading actors from the film dub the scenes (from Spanish into English). The language they use changes, the translation becomes dubious, the design of the subtitles and the conventions of the genre are also transformed and subverted. The outcome is a unique piece that exists on the border between mass television culture and avant-garde performance.

The Story of Batya M. uses the classic story structure of the telenovela but subverts it through the subtitles which have a central role in this work or through the use of poetic elements from cinema language or the appearance of a melodrama researcher who comments about the work. The Story of Batya M. is a work full of humor, drama, poetics and blinks. The work addresses different audiences because allows different levels of reading: it dialogues with cinema, art and telenovela culture. The work deals with the concepts of migration, culture, social issues, and of course….love and revenge :)

[...] In one of their recent video works, Rotman and Mauas use the structure of a south American telenovela not as a comment on high European art and low Sephardic culture (which is still a crucial distinction in Israel’s complex ethnic class structure), but simply because for them it is a direct continuation of the logic of the avant garde, cutting, editing, manipulating and weaving together mythological fragments of narrative [….] In the same chapter of The Revolution of Everyday Life, Vaneigem also famously wrote “people who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life… such people have a corpse in their mouth”. Sala-manca may enjoy unearthing the skeletons in their cross cultural closet, but corpse swallowers they are not. — Pil&Galia Kollectiv,Velvet Magazine, London, Issue 3, February 2008.

The performance was produced and shown at first in the frame of the Bat Yam Street Festival 2007. Was presented at the Jerusalem Film Festival 2008 and EPAF 2008, Warsaw.