2024-01-13 05:28:34
Every now and then some old story, some forgotten myth seems to regain a validity many times greater than what it originally had. Weird thing. As if he had anticipated her time and was waiting for her later there, patient, in the lines of the story.
I felt something like that when a few years ago I came across “Juan Darién”, that extraordinary story by Horacio Quiroga. Such an explosive metaphor regarding hatred of those who are different; such a current image of society’s fear of that beast that it itself has engendered; that he seemed to be writing to himself right there and commenting on reality. I dove into writing the stage version of it in a reflex of enthusiasm. Never, in the years that I have been writing, has a work come out so easy or so quickly. Salvajada was written in five days, with its songs included. In a state of beautiful enchantment. That mysterious fluid that we artists have lived by inventing names and creating myths: muses, numen, angel, inspiration, vein. Ways to explain this exaltation and its whims, to understand estrus. Oestrus. Of all those names that we have given to magic, the one I like the most, already anachronistic, and ugly, let’s say it, is that: estrus. The poetic estro mentioned the old vates. And its reproductive, hormonal reference is, nothing less, where the word estrogen comes from. But the term has another even greater singularity in its origin, which is what moves me. Because estrus is the name of a horsefly that bites and lays its eggs on livestock, which parasitizes it. What they call bichera in the countryside. Sinister but eloquent metaphor: to be inspired is to have living presences within. Bugs. It’s disturbing, and I don’t have a better way to explain what happens to me (when it happens, of course).
In Salvajada it happened. The Quiroga gadfly. I had, of course, a key in my favor: he wrote for puppets, the most poetic of all theatrical mechanisms. That which solves with pure figure the most annoying demands of any realism, no matter how crude it may be. If the represented reality crawls in the viewer’s head, the figurative reality, on the other hand, flies. The puppet, sometimes part for the whole, sometimes pure metaphor, is the perfect art-fact to create conventions. And the theater – following all – is nothing more than that: an eternal factory of conventions. But the most notable thing regarding its codes – those of the puppet – is that once installed they color everything around them, and the other language, that of the actors, the corporal language – always more inflexible – gains with this rainbow a rare flexibility. Let’s see: if you accepted the idea that that hand that flutters with feathers is a bird, nothing is easier than accepting that the other hand of the same body hunts it later. And if that bird speaks, nothing more natural than the actor now being able to dialogue with it. The difference never well considered in the arts between what is true and what is credible. It’s not regarding the thing being true, it’s regarding it being credible. Of course, nothing is easier than putting it in theory. The hard part is making it happen.
When the Cervantes National Theater proposed this new version of Salvajada to me (it had had its premiere a few years ago in a staging inspired by Tito Lorefice), I accepted it with the express condition that Luis Rivera López would be its director. It had been simple to write it because asking for magic in writing is somewhat naive. But now the conjurer was needed. The Quiroga bugs arrived in Luis via Salvajada. He brought together a great cast. The talent of Mónica Felippa and Pablo Mariuzzi, the sensitivity of Valentina Bassi and the histrionics of Carlos Belloso, to name just four. And in Luis’s presentation, the vermin of the myth obeyed their genetics, they inhabited those bodies, and why not, those puppets.
The season at the Cervantes was out of the ordinary, forty shows to full houses. On the day of the premiere, feeling the vibration of the theater from a box, he mightn’t stop thinking regarding it: that gadfly from 1920 had now reached the audience alive. That mysterious vital atavism of myths.
We re-open in January at the Metropolitan. I dream of a bichera on Corrientes Street.
*Director, actor and playwright
Salvajada: Metropolitan Theater
1705139493
#Quiroga #gadfly #Profile