“Nieva is a luminous Valle-Inclán”, is how Rakel Camacho, director of the work, describes the author who has dared to mount an open grave. Is about Coronoda and the bull, a symbolist slapstick as popular as it is transcendent and redemptive. The author, none other than Francisco Nieva, one of the least and worst represented authors in all of contemporary Spanish theatre. A distinguished author, studied in high school textbooks, in theater schools and in university studies. Something that seems to have mummified him more than brought him closer to the public. The production, which has premiered in the Naves del Matadero in Madrid, manages to restore the strength of its avant-garde and anti-bourgeois theatre; and, for the first time, he takes him to the stage with a powerful aesthetic and gay universe present in his works and ignored, overshadowed or, in some sad cases, even ridiculed for so many years.
The system of advisers to select the finalists for the Talía awards compromises their independence
Further
They are the Lantern of San Blas festivities. The theater becomes a plaza, it smells of gunpowder, wine and cocaine. Everyone awaits the arrival of the bull. It will never come. Instead, an alter ego of the 50-year-old Nieva who wrote this work in 1974 will arrive, the Nun Man (Jorge Kent) will arrive with a beard and platforms, a true transvestite of the Streak Order dressed as “walking doctor and jungle Magdaleno” no less than in Rome, to save a society based on machismo and fierce, repressive and static violence. A deafening and amalgamated sound opens the scene. A noise made from the music of popular festivals throughout Spain that stretches out, “so he wanted to enter the furious theater of Nieva, invoke the furies of the wind, as he said, that go in different directions and you don’t know where they’re going to take away, I wanted to introduce the public into a trance”, affirms Camacho.
There the entire cast will enter in droves, overflowing the space, running and screaming. They are people, they are their parties. The mayor Zebedeo (huge Chani Martín) runs and drinks wine, his sister Coronada (Nerea Moreno who is snatched meat) runs hoarsely, the bullfighter Marauña runs wild (a wonderful Pedro Ángel Roca), the priest Don Cerezo (a minstrelsque) runs with his ass and orgiastic and medieval Juanfra Juárez), the whole town runs. And Zebedeo says: “The festivities of Lantern San Blas have arrived, a bloody and well-stocked town, of which I am perpetual mayor and by my popular will.” Thus, the first part of this work begins where echoes of the scathing criticism of the Berlanga of Thursdays, miracleof the rural hallucinations of the Sunrise, which is no small thing of José Luis Cuerda or the Castilian surrealism of the viridiana by Buñuel.
violate the language
We enter the Nieva universe, the chufla al status quo the look without pity and at the same time full of dignity on the common people, and that language that overflows itself. A rich Castilian, with popular roots but condensed to the mystique of grammar, one must “violate the language so that its hidden possibilities are revealed”, Nieva himself said. All of this is in the montage. Camacho achieves with an energetic and bodily performance, nothing psychological or realistic, that Nieva’s text resonates. It’s easy to say, very difficult to do. Nieva’s furious theater is not a traditional theater. Neither in the approach of the scenic space nor in the word, of a poetic height as classic as street. “There is a symbiosis, a union between the old, the classic, the contemporary and the popular that is terrifying. And I think that this is fundamental in Nieva and it is also what I connect with the most. Try to remove barriers between those two worlds. See how to melt them. The highest, most erudite language, the most specialized word, the most sublime speech, with the lowest instinct. And that this is in communication ”, reasons the director. A first part in a state of grace, which will end with Zebedee inviting the entire striped town in a bumper car and with a ritual and powerful dance, the jack of darkness. Pure atavistic and current Spain.
The work, in its second part, becomes almost impossible to represent. The action jumps around constantly. Coronada has hidden the bull in her flat, children run around the cemetery making bellies and laughing, at night we see the gypsy of the town, Mairena (Eva Caballero), jumping from the rooftops, Zebedeo cries out for revenge at night. Everything turns dark, the town searches for the lost bull. At Coronada’s house, the Nun Man, along with some fellow revolutionaries, the Melgas, and that bullfighter sentenced to perpetuity, Marauña, perform their orgiastic ritual. And although Camacho resolves certain scenes with verve and brilliance, such as the orgy, a most Spanish and scatological party with churros and chocolate, the editing does not achieve the clarity of time, space and action that can make the public follow the work.
That is the anathema of the Nieva theater. His freedom, his ability to mix genres, to be at the same time in a symbolic theater, but to mark disparate situations and changes in time and space that are difficult to stage. “If you are going to do a theater in which you do not take risks and you are there simply to do it, without trying to transcend anything, that profession will cease to interest me,” Camacho reacts. “You have to stop to understand Nieva, and not only understand, but connect very well with her universe. In the form is the content. He proposes a customary place in the first part from which the protagonist, Coronada, wants to flee because she drowns there. With the arrival of the Nun Man comes a salvation, a different way of understanding life, there you have to annul the customs and make the flesh present, the resurrection of the flesh that the author proposes. It is another world, it is in another reality where tragedy also becomes salvation. Nieva was a Nietzschean to the core and up to that point we have walked with all the consequences”, argues this director.
snow empowered
The assembly is full of incentives. One of them is the technical team. Baltasar Patiño’s lights help to transit environments. José Luis Raymond’s space, which is both a town square and a bullring, with a floor reminiscent of Goya and symbolizes the traces left by the bull when it is carried dead; and the wardrobe of Ikerne Giménez between the past, the redneck and the kitsch, they get an immersive trip in a Spain that is recognized at first. But perhaps the great success of the show is how the carnality and homosexuality of the Nieva theater is openly addressed.
Francisco Nieva has been represented very little. And when he was made, the incapacity and limitations of the stage direction of the moment did not know how to show the overwhelming power of his theatrical conception. Even when Nieva directed this same play in 1992 at the National Dramatic Center, the thing did not come to fruition. “Not every author, even one of Nieva’s quality and power, has to know how to direct,” Camacho notes. However, the director’s commitment has managed to dust off and shine the subversive message of Nieva’s theater and, something unprecedented until now, has given his theater a vision of gender and a liberating carnality. There is nothing else to see the sexuality that is breathed from the direction to the parliaments of Coronada and the Nun Man. And, furthermore, certain decisions during the play, such as making the mayor Zebedeo urinate on the Nun Man before throwing him out of town, affect the great abyss that Nieva suffered in his time. This act of homophobic and brutal humiliation also links the work with a reality that is well present in Spain today.
Nieva said: “My problem consists of the utopia of wanting my people, all my people, to triumph. I am so attracted to the repressed forces of this country that I would like to write in Moorish gibberish, if I could and was understood, with words of fire and smoke, of all those wrong “according to the law”, in the “way that Spain wanted to give ‘. She wanted to give herself so much shape that she denied the novelty of the spirit to the point of inquisitorially doubting his mystics, in case his outbursts got out of the grid of good feelings. And indeed, they left. Our destiny as a nation has been too stubborn.” Nieva’s sexual positioning is not trivial, from him arises his vision of man, his morals and ethics, and all his reflection on Spain.
“It is evident that the Nieva theater is gay. He was anti-academic, a free autodidact who was looking for his way as he could in the theater, looking for that secret plot that he talks about. She was a person of tremendous erudition, but also of great femininity, she was never comfortable with the place she was given”, explains Camacho, who with this production has managed to lower Nieva from the pedestal of great men who always wanted to be more close to the avant-garde, of that art that is not made for bookstores but to join life. This crowned brings us closer to that Nieva who, in the cold post-war 40s and deafening triumphalism, created postismo in the old Café Castilla in Madrid together with Carlos Edmundo de Ory and Eduardo Chicharro, to that Nieva who clashed with the Creative Youth of the Spanish Falange and who entered the Café Gijón on all fours to bust his acts dressed in fanciful blouses drawn by himself and flaunting sexual gestures with his friend Ory. Al Nieva, in short, who even though he rubbed shoulders with the European avant-garde in Paris when he shot out of the wasteland that Spain had become, even though he met Beckett, Ionesco or painters like Jean Arp, the book that would change his life it was none other than Our Lady of the Flowersby Jean Genet, the sacrosanct bible of the entire gay movement in Saint-Germain-de-Prés, first, and of all the pre-Almodóvar gay intelligentsia and aesthetics in this country led by creators like Adolfo Arrieta.
Carlos Edmundo de Ory, one of Spain’s great 20th century poets, has a statue on the beautiful Alameda Apodaca promenade in Cádiz. Among centenary ficuses, araucarias and Indian laurels, at the edge of the sea, you can find an empty pedestal, with only a few footprints at its base. The poet is not But if you turn your head, you can see him between the trees, running, escaping from honors and heights. It is the great tribute of the city to its poet. But for that you have to be from Cádiz. If you are from Valdepeñas, like his friend and fellow postista, Francisco Nieva, things are different. They can make you a language academic, National Literature Award, even give you the Prince of Asturias award, as they did with the author from La Mancha, but another thing is that they understand you. Nieva’s story is exactly that, that of a misunderstanding. Something that this premiere seems to have begun to change.
Perhaps one of the most pertinent projects undertaken by the public theater in our country this season is this Coronada and the bull. A theater that has already had several hits this season, such as the will to believe by Pablo Messiez, the paris 1940 from Flotats, the great one carnation by Rocío Molina or the work still on the bill Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclan by Xavier Albertí with an amazing Pedro Casablanc, who does whatever he wants on stage until April 9 at the Teatro Español and from April 14 at the Teatre de Lloret in Girona. crowned It is until April 15 on the bill. On the other hand, until April 30 at the Teatro Español itself, there is the exhibition Teatro del privado horror, with stupendous drawings by Nieva from his romantic notebook.