2024-02-08 21:56:23
La Tristura has not adapted for the stage a text from the many novels and essays that Carmen Martin Gaite has. What the Madrid collective has tried to do is create a bridge. That’s how we talked links her stage language with the author of Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan, and the writer who died in 2000 with the current generation that has not yet turned thirty.
Circus Ronaldo, the company with the amazing balance between theater and circus
Next year the centenary of the birth of Martin Gaite will be celebrated, one of the fundamental authors in Spanish of the 20th century, belonging, in the first period, to the Generation of 50 and who in the last quarter of the last century gained followers and freedom with novels like The strange thing is to live (1996) o leave home (1998). A celebration that is expected to be solvent given the difficulty for readers today in finding many of the titles by this author who she began publishing in 1957 with between curtainsNadal Prize-winning novel.
La Tristura (a company formed by Violeta Gil, Itsaso Arana and Celso Giménez) was commissioned by the National Dramatic Center (CDN) to create a piece about a relevant author of the Spanish 20th century. “We were reading a lot, we thought about María Zambrano, Rosa Chacel, Carmen Laforet, but with Martín Gaite we felt a greater bond: the search for the human, to communicate with the other, to generate a group, that is also very much ours,” Violeta Gil explains to this newspaper. According to the words of the director of the CDN, Alfredo Sanzol, at a press conference, the project is part of the will of this institution “to work with the repertoire of great female authors of the 20th century.” Something that, on the other hand, has only been addressed so far with the show that opened this season, Frankenstein’s mothernby Almudena Grandes.
Variable Cloudiness is a musical group
But the trajectory of La Tristura is not that of repertory theater. What’s more, it is the first commission they have accepted in their 20 years of experience. All his works, since his first assembly in 2007, The speed of the father, the speed of the mother, have been of their own, collective creation, based on slow production processes. Now, they have found themselves immersed in a different rhythm, that of the CDN, but, logically, they have wanted to take the project to their territory.
On stage we see a music group, Variable Cloudiness (title of one of the author’s novels), which has released a first conceptual album with all the lyrics based on the writer’s texts. She has done well for them. But their leader, Sofia (who has the same name as the novel’s protagonist), dies due to an accident. Something that happens in the first 10 minutes of work. We are in the recording studio, a catwalk space designed by Marcos Morau (director of La Veronal), Sofia listens to how two colleagues from the group record a song, she says goodbye, we hear out of frame that there has been an accident and the space breaks in temporality. A great snowstorm devastates the stage while a body dances emulating the gothic aesthetic of that strange novel by Martín Gaite, The queen of the snow.
Sofia has died. The group fades away for a year. The rest of the work will be the effort of that group to get back together and release a new album. But the foundations of the proposal are already established: “It made no sense to adapt a literary text to the theater and work on it recovering its historical scope, be it the post-war period or the transition, for example. We don’t do that and we wouldn’t know. We have worked on the topics that obsessed her such as loss, death or the importance of listening and being heard. The show is imbued with the atmosphere of Carmen,” explains Gil, who when reflecting on the relationship between this author and the new generations argues that “her universe clearly appeals to our generation and the following ones: her vision of love, of the importance about relationships, how vital it is to spend time together…”
The company says that there have been texts by the author that have been very present during the assembly, “especially Stringswhere two young people spend a night together waiting for their grandmother’s death, and the compilation of articles that was called The search for an interlocutor and other searches”, Violeta explains.
A warning: Ignacio Aldecoa has died
But after viewing the work there is an article by The search for an interlocutor which is revealed as the intimate heart of the piece. Carmen Martín Gaite published it in 1969, in La Estafeta Literaria. It is the one that the author dedicated to the death of her friend the writer Ignacio Aldecoa, whom she met in her early years at the University of Salamanca and who later, already in Madrid, would introduce her to the literary circle of Alfonso Sastre, Jesús Fernández Santos and Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. In that article, titled A warning: Ignacio Aldecoa has died The three arteries of the show are combined: death, the passage of time and companionship.
The tremendous ending of the article seems to be hovering over every scene of the play. In it, Martín Gaite says: “The oldest friend I had left in Madrid and whose death has entered like a merciless wind into the ark of these memories that seemed too early to review. (…) Ignacio Aldecoa has died: the forties and fifties, whether we like it or not, are beginning to be history.” The wind in Sofia’s death at the beginning of the play. La Tristura’s obsession that something is closed with this work and the suspicion that now there is something that is beginning to become history. The determination to continue seeing that vitality of camaraderie and community in the youngest, in this case its actors. All of this is what forms the backbone of the stage proposal.
But the montage has its chiaroscuros. The brightest side is its actors, not because of dedication and vitality, which is assumed, but because of talent and projection. Headlining the show is a huge Language (Elena Villa) singer who already amazed with her first epé and who with her album Lucero has confirmed it. The Madrid artist takes over the scene, performs with ease and also gives live one of the most appreciated songs of her short career, Quiet. There is also the fragility of Gonzalo Herrero, the power of Belén Martí Lluch (from the Mucha Muchacha company), or the birth of an unrealized actor, incipient, but who at times hits the target, Marcos Úbeda. The latter, who has also just released his first epé as Marcos Nobody, and Ede have composed the majority of the show’s music.
During the play, the viewer can see the grief of each character in the face of loss and how they rebuild themselves as a group from the shatters. The parallelism with the trajectory of La Tristura opens in a fertile and non-illustrative, oblique game that speaks of the nature of the emotional communities that are involved in creation processes. But it is surprising that this is the only thing we know about these young people who are still assimilating and being assimilated by the social, labor and political system. It is not known what social class they come from, nothing is said about their work or housing problems, or their political thoughts. Thus, what remains is an incomplete portrait, which affects scenes where chatter prevails and that lightness tinged with freshness to which La Tristura sometimes tends and which is reminiscent of the film directed by Itsaso Arana, The girls are fine, film that is up for the best new director award at this year’s Goya Awards.
The work, which will be on display until March 24, has a staging that knows how to explode in aesthetic enjoyment, an impeccable sound and a solid structure where the parts are announced with titles by the Salamancan author: It’s a strange thing to live, Variable cloudiness, The book of fever, The snow queen. Furthermore, acting he can only grow. But this truncated portrait of a youth that does not know what it is based on and the tendency at certain times to syrup, in which this company also tends to fall, make the show shake a bit. The scene where Carmen Martín Gaite speaks from the afterlife thanks to an artificial intelligence program will be as hated as it is loved. This is what ghostly invocations have on stage.
That’s how we talkedFurthermore, it raises another issue. It is at an institutional level. The work is the CDN’s own production. Its production and exhibition budget amounts to 240,000 euros. But it is not planned to rotate. He will die on March 24th. This year only two productions will rotate, Bernarda Alba’s housedirected by Sanzol himself and which premieres this Friday, y Brief history of the Spanish railway by Joan Yago. The budget does not allow for more.
But due to the nature of this project, which recovers the universe and the figure of an author like Martín Gaite, it is little understood that the montage remains imprisoned in the capital. Even more so when La Tristura is a company with great international projection. His productions have been seen in the main theaters of France, Germany, Brazil and Poland. On other occasions her works have also been produced by other national institutions. It does not seem very difficult that the CDN could have collaborated with some of these and have taken the name of Martin Gaite to other provinces and even beyond Spanish geography.
After That’s how we talked, La Tristura will reconsider what to do. For years its members have been involved in individual projects. Arana will soon premiere a new film with Jonás Trueba as an actress, You will return. Gil is also working with film director Elena Pérez Riera. And Giménez is writing two films, one by Gabriel Azorín, Last night I conquered Thebes. They have already killed La Tristura several times, but they are still there, and it has been that way for 20 years. 20 years in which they have made their theater fundamental to understanding the national scene of the 21st century.
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