2023-06-28 12:09:47
The irruption of the extreme right in the departments of culture of numerous municipalities predicts actions that seemed banished from political practice. Unacceptable interventions such as the one denounced by the company Teatro Defondo, whose representation of Orlando by Virginia Woolf scheduled for November 25 in Valdemorillo (Madrid), within the program of the 7 Villas Festival of the Community of Madrid, has been canceled by “decision of the government team. The new Councilor for Culture and Tourism, Victoria Amparo Gil Movellán, from the far-right Vox party, has made that decision in her first hours in office.
“We are scared,” admits Pablo Huetos, founder and actor of the company, who considers that what happened in Valdemorillo with the cancellation of his Orlando is the tip of an iceberg “that is not going to stop here, in all the councils of culture in which among Vox this is the slogan: veto, suspend functions at the slightest indication of an ideology that does not interest them ”.
Huetos regrets that his company was one of the first to suffer the censorship of this new municipal inquisition, but he knows that it has also happened with other works —“it has happened in Navarra with a function called Fosa, politically more complex, it talks about the disappeared in the civil war”— and he understands that it will depend on who occupies the councilorship: “Vox has marked a line and each councilor will or will not do it, we have had a councilor who seems to be going to follow the guidelines of the party with a machete ”.
The company describes the suspension of the work as “a very serious act that violates freedom of expression and culture”
The company describes the suspension of the work as “a very serious act that violates freedom of expression and culture” and stresses that the real reasons for the veto are political, not economic or artistic. After the communication of the cancellation, they had a telephone conversation with the City Council in which it was revealed that it is a case of “ideological veto by the incoming councilor, Victoria Amparo Gil Movellán, going over the agreement already established by the outgoing team, because the protagonist of the show goes from being a man to being a woman and denounces the differences that this means”. Huetos recalls that Orlando is “much more complex than that, but for Vox it is an issue that is in the crosshairs of things that must be demonized and suppressed.”
Teatro Defondo has agreed to represent another play in Valdemorillo, which for the moment is being maintained “because it is ideologically whiter”, it is a function that takes a tour of the history of theater in Spain. The company, with more than two decades of professional experience, had never suffered a similar episode with other works or with Orlando itself, of which they have done more than a hundred shows.
Huetos assures that the company does not seek financial compensation or that they offer them another date, but that their intention is to make known what has happened and to serve as a warning for what may be to come. “We want to denounce that a work of universal literature and a world-renowned author have been banned. Neither this nor any piece of art should be the subject of political censorship in a State governed by law. Trying to demonize culture and reduce it to tendentious labels is only the first step towards burning books that do not conform to the dominant ideology”, they predict from Teatro Defondo.
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