2023-08-26 03:01:00
Strengthen memory. Win over oblivion Valeria clings to her memories and makes a place of resistance out of it. Between four walls, she builds her own world of Esperanto translations and communications with spirits. From that plot starts Valeria and the birds, a piece by the Spanish playwright José Sanchis Sinisterra that is presented with the direction of Alejandro Giles and the interpretation of the Andalusian actress Pepa Luna. The performances take place on Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., at the Border Theater (Godoy Cruz 1838).
With music by Braian Arévalo and directing assistance by Vanina Rivera, the production is completed with the voiceovers of Carlos Romero Franco, Claribel Medina, Fernando Gonet, Marcos Montes, Miguel Jordán, Ana María Castel, Emma Rivera, Livian Fernan and Roberto Vallejos. And it is that the protagonist dialogues with various characters from other planes because she has an objective: to reunite with a great love of adolescence, the revolutionary Telmo Castán, victim of torture by a Latin American military regime and buried in a common grave. Knowing what happened to him is the search engine for her.
Along the same lines as Ay, Carmela, the well-known work with which Sanchis Sinisterra denounced the horror of Francoism, the warning of the danger of totalitarianisms is resumed. And Giles is a great connoisseur of that poetry, since he directed numerous pieces by the author such as Ay herself, Carmela, The extras and Olga / Masha / Irina (from Chekhov’s The Three Sisters).
“Our insides control oblivion, and that is why it is important that we work on ourselves, and with others, accompanying us to activate memory,” reflects Giles, who has just brought the show to Uruguay and is also planning a national tour. “It is very important to me to take the shows I do to different places and share them with people, and to propose that the artists from those places do the same. I believe that one should talk about what one knows and, if one wishes, transfer it and share it. It is good to make theater and cinema with our own forms and expressions, and not copied ones that have nothing to do with us. Working on identity is elaborating one’s own origin”.
-You have directed several works by Sanchis Sinisterra. What attracts you to this author?
-Sanchis writes about simple, small, unpretentious beings, incapable of all heroism. Many times their lives play out in a huge context for them, and there’s apparently not much they can do other than develop ways to survive the cruelty of the world and remember those who went before to keep them alive. I connect with his works on all these topics.
-And especially, what reflections does this piece generate in you?
-José offered me to do Valeria and the birds a few years ago at a meeting in Madrid and I was moved by its design, its dimension and the complexity to tell it. It is very demanding both for the interpretation and for the direction because it generates a lot of frustration until you internalize it and understand the dynamics of it. The work encourages us to reflect on how to sustain ourselves in a world that permanently proposes us to forget about our desire, our well-being and our ideas. And also about how to make a process about the inevitable, because everything on this plane ends at some point.
-Although it is a solo work, this is a choral work, since the voices of numerous characters intervene. How did you solve that challenge from the direction?
-The connection with the musician Braian Arévalo was fundamental. We work side by side, each one in their own area, and fortunately we have dear colleagues who collaborated in recording each character and then editing them so that Pepa Luna could interact with each one. It was a challenge in communion between actress, musician and director.
-The work (like others by the author) invites an exercise in memory. What contribution do you think theater can make in this task of reflection?
-I think it can help the exercise of having memory both individually and collectively. A story with our themes takes us on a journey that inevitably helps us to think and reflect. In this sense, we have, for twenty-three years, the Theater for Identity cycle to which as a society we owe a lot. That is a great example of how theater helps the exercise of not forgetting.
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