The sea: vision of children who have never seen it
Authorship and direction: Xavier Bobés and Alberto Conejero. With: Xavier Bobés and Sergi Torrecilla. Dramaturgy: Alberto Conejero, based on texts by the girls and boys of the Bañuelos de Bureba school, by their teacher Antoni Benaiges, Marina Garcés and Alberto Conejero. Municipal Theater of Girona. January 27
It’s been years Xavier Bobés is playing catch in his hands the memories of a past that is learning. He did it in the most beautiful way Things that are easily forgotten and with the other “object detectives” of the Solar to the theatrical pieces he dedicated to the last carpentry in the Old Quarter of Girona or to the barracks past of Barcelona. The object handler now returns to The sea: vision of children who have never seen itallied with another poet, in this case of the word, Alberto Conejeroto recover for the theater the memory of Antoni Benaiges, one of the many republican teachers retaliated by Franco.
Executed a few days after the coup of 1936, Benaiges had committed the sin of leaving his home, in Mont-roig del Camp, to moved, moved by the vocation, to a tiny town in Burgos, Bañuelos de Bureba, to apply the ideas of the modern school. From a small rural classroom and with the help of a gramophone and a printer that he paid for out of pocket, Mr. Master he instilled in the babysitter knowledge, airs of freedom and the importance of dreaming, with the promise of taking them one day to see the sea. He doesn’t get to fulfill it, because is tortured, shot and buried in a mass grave in the summer of 36.
The sea…which passed through Girona on Friday and arrives in Figueres on Sunday, is a delicious poetic piece, halfway between the more conventional theater and that of objectswhich works wonderfully thanks to the actor Sergi Torrecillawhich is eager to give voice to the idealism of Benaiges, and of everything that comes out of Bobés’ Encants briefcases, treasure chests full of photographs, postcards, printer’s tools or pages of the newspapers that the teacher published with his students. This time, however, he renounces the proximity imposed by the manipulation of objects and live cameras are used to transfer the image to a large screenin which delicate animations are also projected, a resource that does not detract from the artisan work he does.
Subtly, through the details, the show poses a one-hour journey that goes from the illusion of a militant master to the bitterness of his executionin a story that irrevocably refers to the stories of Manuel Rivas and the film The tongue of butterflies.
The final witnesses, sound recordings of some of Benaiges’ disciples, now elderlyremind the viewer that, despite the horror, the coup plotters did not completely kill that seed of free ideas that the master planted.