Laugh at Shakira’s mean songs. From Rosalías Desphá and all the heartbreaking hits you’ve heard lately. In her new show Vudú (3318) Blixen, which premiered this Saturday at the Festival Montaña Alta Girona, Angélica Liddell calls directly on the devil to display, for almost six hours, all her wounded animal rage and transform it into poetry, in which she demonstrates once again why she is the most international and influential creator of contemporary Spanish theater. A work that brought the audience to their feet even before the artist officially ended the performance and received a ten-minute ovation, although it could have lasted longer because the audience was reluctant to get up from their seats despite being there all the time. the afternoon. A full-fledged theater event.
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We don’t say “event” just because of the ovation or the extraordinary length of the show. In three decades of her career, Angélica Liddell has been celebrated on stages around the world and her productions are usually not neglected: “La casa de la Fuerza”, the play that made her a name in Europe and for which she won the National Prize for in 2012 dramatic literature, it already took five hours. Voodoo (3318) Blixen is “event” because it is a major work on the level of The House of Strength. A work prepared with the usual ingredients – angry monologues, visual poems and dozens of literary, aesthetic, cultural, anthropological references, all conceived and interpreted by her – but at the same time unique.
Angélica Liddell is forever the same and at the same time always different. That’s why his works are experienced as a carousel of emotions: even if you know his language well – or perhaps because of that – you never know what he will do in the next scene. She harmed herself live, she put a dildo in her vagina, she impaled herself like the penitents of Valverde de la Vera. Few artists manage to generate so much excitement through their presence on stage alone. For her, theater is not representation, but ritual: it is always self-referential and really happens. “Instead of dismembering children, I write,” the work says.
Another moment in the six-hour montage of Ángelica Liddell’s work.Luca Del Pia
Also in Voodoo (3318) Blixen. When Angelica Liddell trims a man’s beard or braids a young woman’s braid, she really does it. Two men skin a dead rabbit. Two live macaws are flying. A thousand red carnations, as many white ones, half a ton of rice, a slaughtered chicken. A registered notary reads and certifies the artist’s final wishes with precise instructions for her funeral: among other things, that her coffin be white and that 101 cannon shots will sound. The cannons will sound and a live crow will roam the stage around this white coffin.
Of course there is also abandonment and malice. The first of the five acts into which the show is divided begins with the artist singing the famous Ne me quitte pas (Don’t leave me) by Jacques Brel in a deliberately grotesque manner, and then begins with a furious monologue that reaches the point of pathos. But “a crazy look is not wrong,” he warns with a final wink.
In the second act he wallows in hatred. She describes the man who betrayed her with a love story and then abandoned her, and attacks him with words: This makes her want to look for him and break his legs. In the third, there are no words, but vivid paintings full of religious symbolism, others that are incomprehensible but fun nonetheless, and references to voodoo rituals that are then performed on stage. This section features a majority of the thirty extras who appear throughout the performance parade to form these living tableaux or to serve as silent support.
The moment in which a rabbit is skinned on stage in “Vudú (3318) Blixen”.luca del pia
Act Four: The justification of true love based on a real event that happened in Madrid at Christmas 2022. Love is above all. Despite the pain or precisely because of it: this suffering is the starting point of creation. This idea is central and runs through the entire exhibition, as the artist is the writer Isak Dinesen, whose real name was Karen Blixen and who is said to have sold her soul to the devil in return for the ability to transform , used as a mirror and repeatedly referring to it, transforming it into a literary work. each of their experiences.
The fifth act is entitled To Death I Call. After witnessing the decline and death of both her parents in recent years at the age of 57, Angelica Liddell begins with a warning on a dark stage and a voice from beyond: From now on, only decay and death remain. A devastating monologue that left much of the audience devastated. You better accept it and prepare your own funeral.
This is the prosaic and simple summary of the true journey to death that Angélica Liddell proposes to us in this work. In the company of the devil and without renouncing the horrors of life, but also not renouncing its beauties. This is the show: terrible and beautiful at the same time.
The premiere of Vudú (3318) Blixen was one of the highlights of the week that the Girona Season Festival dedicates to programmers with presentations of avant-garde works that could be contracted for national or international tours. Also on display were the latest works by Rodrigo García, Roger Bernat, the duo Nao Albet-Marcel Borràs, the companies Cabosanroque, La Veronal and Hotel Colectiu Escánico, as well as the Argentine creator Marina Otero, who fits exactly into this series by Angélica Liddell for hers monologue style and the self-referential nature of their shows. “I write not to commit suicide,” he says in Love me, programmed in Girona.
Angélica Liddell’s shadow is long.
All the culture that goes with it awaits you here.
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