The History of Ronald, the Clown of McDonald

Recognizing the weirdness of foodstuffs churned out by the industry of leisure and artificial pleasures. Exposing the harmful side-effects of the sort of education that dulls the sensitivities of young people plunged in a perpetual pre- sent time. Reviving the poetry of matter and flesh. In a ritual that is punctuated with angry words, the bodies of the actors fling themselves in the unctuousness of milk, pools of wine and cola, like fish out of water, like birds caught in an oil-slick. Symbol of frenzied consumerism and the bulimia of a world that’s hard to digest, the McDonald’s clown, appears to be an attractive figure who laughs at his misdeeds and his auto-dafés. The double language of advertising, cheap sentiment, the civilizing propaganda of political power, the tattooing of food and clothing brand names which entrap the children and sap the confidence of the individual in society. Three bragging actors let rip and commentate images of Tom and Jerry or Margaret Thatcher on a stage transformed into a parlour, an over- flow, into a “vomitorium“.

A thousand miles from stage entertainment, this critical and visual performance uses all the tricks of the art of diversion to create sudden surprise or shock in order to escape from a world that has become alien to us.

For one and a half hour, The History of Ronald, the Clown of McDonald's is proposing you to mistrust some dark-coloured soft drinks, some foods which may be consumed up to the year 2007, to mistrust people who give you work, and also, why not, to mistrust yourself.

The viewer here will confront long sequences where semi-naked bodies fall about on a more and more filthy stage: milk, soft drinks, hamburgers, ketchup and all kind of products are piling up there on the floor, products which seem so harmless on the shelves of supermarkets, but which actually hide a lot behind.

This work talks about labour exploitation; about a nation trying to rule the whole globe; it talks about betrayal at all levels, from our politicians' betrayal to our own betrayals in daily life; it talks about the history of hypocrisy in countries like Argentina, where the misery is growing every day as a result of a careful economic destruction; torture is talked about…
(…)
A rebellious theatre, made up of resistance and genuine opposition to the nameless wave, which is dragging us more and more towards uniformity, this colonization – globalisation.
from company’s materials