The next 10 and 11 March it will be performed at the Teatro Central in Seville, Sapphoby the hand of Christina Rosenvinge/ Marta Pazos/ Maria Folguera: I find it very stimulating as well as daring, when contemporary creators undertake projects to vindicate figures from our history. Approaching them, beyond responding to a “rumor” that has been used up to now, and from a place that would allow us when we leave the theater, we feel impelled to truly immerse ourselves in their world. And if it happens that within the public there are those who have dedicated part of their company to getting to know it, then why not propose a “game” in which they meet again with the figure in question, without the “uses and customs” of the most academic fields.
This project by Christina Rosenvinge/ Marta Pazos/ María Folguera radiates in its synopsis and its promotional videos, the need to perhaps not “rewrite” the figure of Sappho, but to expand it, carrying out a hermeneutical exercise that leads us to resignify it in the days that run. Starting from the base, that our values have been transformed, substantially, in relation to when the majority of their texts were eliminated. Therefore, we are facing an opportunity to choose which interpretation we stay with, how it can enrich us to understand what we are doing with the reception of Sappho, since in the end, she can no longer take the turn to speak.
Photo: David Ruano
Without more to add, I leave you with a preview of Sappho.
THREE CREATORS OF REFERENCE OF THE SPANISH CONTEMPORARY SCENE BRING A MUSICAL, VISUAL AND STAGE POEM TO THE STAGE, A METATHEATRAL GAME THAT, BETWEEN THE PAST AND THE PRESENT, BRINGS US CLOSER TO THE FIGURE OF A POETESS OF CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY.
They say that he wrote more than ten thousand verses, but only a few complete poems have survived to this day. Still, he is one of the great figures of classical antiquity, an enigmatic figure whom Plato considered the tenth muse. She was a famous poetess who, according to her own verses, often fell in love with her disciples.
The character, mysterious due to the lack of reliable information we have about her, stars in a stage proposal directed by Marta Pazos, director, playwright and set designer, one of the great figures of avant-garde creation. Next to her, Christina Rosenvinge, National Award for Current Music 2018 for her entire career, who reinvents Sappho’s verses in the form of a song. And María Folguera, a playwright who is an expert in revisiting the life and work of great writers, who provides textual dramaturgy, has imagined a Sappho who, feeling like she is dying, summons the muses in a garden on the island of Lesbos where she was born and asks them who and how they will remember your name in the future. The muses will take her and the spectators on a journey through time that will go from the time of Ovid to a Christie’s auction, while she draws the portrait of the human Sappho, responsible in a certain way for understanding love.
We will discover what is known about the artist, but also what we have imagined, the role she has played in an eminently masculine literary canon, the fantasies projected on her and the speculations of literary scholars about her figure, a sample of prejudices and the prevailing values at each moment in history.