To do Yerma now in this special times
of War, of problematic situations, of insecurity, people feel a lot of insecurity, of
tensions between people, between things, between the world - Yerma is really
the piece that we have to do now. It was not forgotten, it is never forgotten.
In Stockholm it's been a long time, the last time it was in the 80s really big it was
in the 60s but it's coming back all over the world again - Amsterdam London and also
Stockholm. Why now? Because it is a piece,
it is a poetical tragedy, in fact you could say a
tragic poem about who we try to be and who we are. Who we are hiding to be and what we
have to concure in this world as gender, in gender problematics, in being a family, being people amongst each other
being on the world in the world. So I think Yerma is really telling a lot of our
world, of our landscape. The emotional landscape, the psychological landscape and also the
political and personal landscape you're living in. For us here now one
of the most important themes
of Yerma is how to be related. Related with the world, not only with each other also with
nature and with the things that surround us, with insecurity. So relatedness and loneliness.
People in this piece - Yerma but also her husband Juan, we also bring in Lorca as author of the
piece (but of course as an audience we are all authors), they are really trying to find
a relation with each other with the world that surrounds them from a deep loneliness
within but a
lso from a deep urge to relate. Yes in this play how we do it now we bring Lorca
on stage, he is visible, he's really very visible. Lorca, of course, as a poet and a writer he
was very special at this time in Spain. But not only in Spain, he traveled a lot and was like
a wanderer looking for worlds to connect with. We bring him on stage because as a person and as the
writer of the piece and as a writer of the poem he is looking at the figures he made as we are always
looking at the figures
and our surroundings. He is looking at his creations but at the same time, and
therefore it's important to bring him on stage, we can also see how he is relating to the persons
he's creating and doubting and having fear. As we know and as we will get to know in the piece
he is murdered by very traditional conservative politicians in Spain at that time. He was like
an outsider in this society so as an outsider in a society of Spain of that time we bring him
on our stage to see how the outsid
er is writing, how the outsider is feared, how we are we are
trying to connect with him because of course when he is a writer we and every figure on scene
has a connection with this writer because they are his creations. So this is a beautiful tension
that we also give to the audience - not to make a choice but to feel like how every individual
on this scene is also a part of yourself. The very important thing of Lorca in his
time was that he was homosexual. He was not traditional he had a
lot of critique about
the conservative society. How it was evolving, how the nation was forming itself and how
it wanted people to be like creations of the nation. So as a writer he said I will create
my creations. But as a gay homosexual person he had a lot of tension within himself, like
every sexual being has tension within himself or herself or themselves, but also there were a
lot of tensions with his choice of his sexuality. In fact you could say the state came into his
bed, and the
state is also coming into our bed, always. So this tension and this way of looking
at Lorca in his society - we look at how we see a writer now and how the conservative tensions in
our society are now, how the society wants us to make a family or behave in a certain way to
each other. How is the gaze of the state coming into our streets in violence against homosexuals
for instance or violence against nonconformist families or violence within the families itself.
So it is really also about h
ow the state is laying in our beds and therefore the figure of Lorca
is really very important. Not that we elevate this sexual choices but it's the fluidity of the
possibility to have this choice, that we bring in. So I've worked with Lisaboa a long time and
sometimes it's called dramaturgy or sometimes it's called philosophical advice but it's
not an advice, it's not dramaturgy as such. What I like is to make like a dramaturgy of the
banality or the ordinary things that are inside and surr
ounding us and bringing this together
in a landscape. And this is how Lisaboa always works. I've worked with her since she was
a student. It is about thinking and working with a repertoire with very deep in the world
embedded stories, narratives. Not only European narratives because in good narratives things come
together. So this very old very deep stories that stay alive during centuries. It can be the Greek
but it can also be 20th century stories like Lorca or Brecht. Lisaboa works a lot
with paintings so
we can also, and this is for everyone of us for everyone in the audience - you see a painting
but you don't have to understand totally, he's talking to you so we want pieces that
are talking to each other and talking to the audience and this is making a landscape with
light with very good Light Designer. Lorca called his theater piece a poem in different scenes
so how can we make a poem of today that is resonating with us today? And then we also have
the layers of music.
It's a kind of geography, it's an atlas but not like a traditional one but
one that shows all the landscapes that's in our society and in this piece and in ourselves and
also in the words. So the landscape is also made of the music that is composed especially for
this piece. So in her way of working it's not saying to people - you have to do this. It comes
from within and it's starting to have a breath, so it's looking for a breath from everyone
who is in a scene and working. She has a lot
of talks and thinking together so it's a
piece about relatedness but it's also a working process of how we make togetherness
in everything that's surrounding us.
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