2023-07-21 23:15:05
Cayetana Guillen Cuervo as Agripina, the world-famous artist Okuda San Miguel intervening in the stage space, Laila Ripoll, one of the great theater authors, writing; and the great “non-binarix stage muse”, as the Chilean dancer La Merce defines herself, are some of the wickers on which the choreographer Chevy Muraday has relied to create his new show, Pandataria A work that is a hymn to diversity and that sinks its roots in the subjugation of women in patriarchal Rome to make a journey to the present through dance and words.
Muraday has also called up one of the greats of the national rap scene, Elio Toffana, that man from Madrid who spins strangely and hits the target with lyrics like “my Carmina Burana is the heroine of Madrid / psychotic break on a gray afternoon, they are the tears that I later wrote”, or who sounds like a neighborhood when he sings “the great truth is that everything is a lie, pass me the hash joint, we will continue to live”. The show already has a long contracted tour, more than sixty bowling that will begin in September in Santander at the Festival Palace and that it will arrive in Madrid in February at Canal Theaters.
‘Pandataria’ means in Greek the island of the five beasts. An islet lost in the Tyrrhenian Sea in front of the city of Naples, today called Ventotene, a Perejil of a scarce kilometer and a half square of surface. A nothing where the great women of Rome who made power uncomfortable ended up, and where the anti-fascist political prisoners ended up under the yoke of Mussolini before the Second World War broke out. A metaphor island. Chevy Muraday remembers that two years ago, when he was asked to work for the Mérida Festival, he began to study and dive into Greco-Latin culture. “After quite a bit of study, I found this fascinating story of an island that was used by several Caesars after the rule was enacted. Julia’s Law of Adulteryfor which adultery was severely punished, to banish the women who overshadowed them,” he recalls.
“I was amazed that four generations of the same family, influential, wives and mother of the Caesars, ended up deported there. Women who were later erased from history. And I thought it was good to be able to give them the floor. This is how the project began”, explains Muraday about Julia, the eldest daughter of Emperor Augustus, who for convenience forced to have descendants with a much older husband, Agrippa. They had Caligula, who would later be emperor, and Agrippina, who was accused of adultery and left to die on the island of starvation. Before Agrippina had another daughter: Julia Livila, who was first banished to the Island and when she returned to Rome she was accused of adultery with Seneca and sentenced to death by starvation.
Ursula Hirschmann, the mother of Europe
“When I continued studying about the Island, I found that right there, another Caesar, in this case the dictator Mussolini, also sent the anti-fascist dissidents imprisoned there. It was when I discovered the story of Ursula Hirschmann, one of the founders of the idea of Europe. That’s when I understood what the work I had embarked on was about, about that journey from the old Roman Empire to today’s Europe. It is a journey for those women that becomes a pure defense of diversity and understanding of the other”, affirms Muraday.
A play for which Muraday called Laila Ripoll, author of fundamental texts on contemporary theater such as Slow speed (2000), The missing child (2005) o Saint Perpetua (2010). Writer and director in her company Micomicón de ella, she is a benchmark for political theater and the memory of the scene. “This is the first time I have worked in this way, it has been a very new process for me”, admits Ripoll, who sent parts of the text to Muraday and after trying them out on stage, he returned them with dimensions to adapt them to the parameters of the show. “It’s a different way of working, the text is based on the movement, in the end what is written has the same aroma where you don’t have to argue or explain everything like we do in the theater,” says Ripoll about this show for which Muraday has called on the veteran Mariano Marín to compose the music and in which the lights are provided by David Picazo.
This work is a journey through those women that becomes a pure defense of diversity and understanding of the other.
Chevy Muraday—stage manager
The author also reveals to this newspaper how the documentation process was very laborious both in Roman times and in the 20th century. “When I began to scratch in the figure of Ursula Hirschmann I realized that this was a vein. Ursula is the mother of Europe”, Ripoll details about this stateless Jewish of German origin who would marry Eugenio Colorni, a young socialist philosopher who was imprisoned on that same island. It was there that she, together with Ernesto Rossi and Altierio Spinelli, published the Ventotene Manifesto, one of the founding documents of European federalist thought.
“It is a beautiful manifesto, which has nothing to do with the Europe we have today but which does dream of a Europe without borders, more equal. They write that manifesto on cigarette paper and it is Ursula who takes it out of there and takes it to the Italian peninsula to publish it. Ursula’s story is tremendous, her husband in 1944 was beaten almost to death by a fascist patrol and then finished off with three shots, she ends up aphasic, unable to speak, which means that she cannot finish the memoirs she was writing. It seemed to us that this woman, this image of Ursula, now older, with all the struggle behind her and unable to speak, was the perfect link with Roman women, with the entire history of women in Europe”, says the author.
“That is why in the play Agrippina and Ursula are the same person, that is why in the play Agrippina says to Seneca: ‘Your words hurt me like a beating, like a clash of bones, like blows that lead to death'”, Ripoll points out. “The entire text is full of those little windows that the viewer doesn’t have to know either, but that accumulate and merge with the language of dance, which is pure poetry,” he concludes.
the imaginary museum
Agripina, Ursula, is Cayetana Guillén Cuervo. “This is the first theater that I stepped foot in my life,” she recalls to this newspaper, “I was five years old, I was a page in a production of Julius Caesar with my mother.” Later, Cayetana was back in this space in a version of the Autumn by Plauto in 1987 and already in 2013 under the direction of Josep María Pou with fires, that work in which Margarite Yourcenar declared her neurotic and unrequited love for her publisher through Greek myths. Cayetana confirms to this newspaper that she also dances in the play, that she is delighted with the trip with Chevy Muraday, “he is a genius in his own, super gifted”, and highlights the diversity of the cast, the mixture of disciplines on stage, Ripoll’s words: “I think it is a necessary beauty that screams for diversity, for love, for empathy. Its only banner is inclusion”.
Andrex Malraux, the anti-fascist author and later French minister under General de Gaulle, spoke in his book The imaginary museum, of the mutation capacity of art. He gave the Greek statues as an example, as the passage of time: when they were created they were polychrome, their aesthetic capacity and meaning had changed. Pandataria it began to take shape two years ago, but in recent weeks everything seems to be taking on other resonances. Political interference in culture and the denial of gender violence and gender policies have been two of the battlehorses of the electoral campaign.
The team of Pandataria he knows. “We’ve talked a lot to each other about it these days,” Muraday acknowledges. “The story is not taken at random, I wanted to talk about this. The cast, with a Muslim, a black dancer and a non-binary trans woman, is not accidental either, ”he argues. “The play is not politicized, that is something that has never interested me, but it is true that on Sunday when we are dancing the vote count will be taking place. It is going to be a special function”, acknowledges Muraday.
When asking Guillén Cuervo about this, his answer is more distant. “The work has no ideological intention, it is not a response to anything, perhaps these days it will resonate differently, but the work began to take shape two years ago, I would not want it to be located in any political environment,” he affirms. When asked for her opinion on a possible regression of Spanish society on issues that the work deals with, such as diversity and women’s rights, Cayetana responds incredulously: “I really want to think that we have to move forward, that the Constitution and our democracy are strong. When someone steps on this country, they want to stay and live. We are open, hospitable, funny, friendly. We have many hours of sun, more bars than anyone else… Honestly, I can’t think we’re going to go backwards, I can’t believe it”.
Laila Ripoll recalls that in one of the first conversations she had with Muraday and Cayetana there was talk of making a song to diversity, but that “right now talking about diversity has become revolutionary. We are on the edge of a very fucked up and dangerous precipice. Everything now takes on another dimension. That is why theater is what it is, that is why theater is a political art like no other, ”she argues. “In theater that happens, you are talking about one thing and suddenly the circumstances change and that itself takes on a dimension that you did not think when you created it. We thought that there were things that we had all assumed and we are seeing that they are not ”, she concludes.
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