Home » Entertainment » Javier Viana, playwright and actor: “I’m not Lorca, I try to get his words through me”

Javier Viana, playwright and actor: “I’m not Lorca, I try to get his words through me”

Independent actor, musician, writer, director and producer, Javier Viana (Málaga, 1971) is armed in Espejo, a scenic whim of Lorca’s personal experiences, his epistolary relationships, conferences and extracts from his work, to rescue the character from the darkness that surrounds his murder and focus on the opposite: the shine of your goblin.

How was your personal fascination for Lorca born?

Dedicating yourself to art in this country, since you are studying Lorca is fluttering around. Personally I fall in love with Lorca’s work and I begin to have a close bond as a result of reading it and not feeling a poetic justice in his figure.

In what sense?

I understand that Lorca is a person full of light, and the fact that he was assassinated has enveloped everything that had to do with him in drama and tragedy. I felt I was in debt, and since I consider myself a friend of Lorca for many reasons, I had the need to make a show that exudes vitality and does poetic justice with his way of being in the world, which is much brighter than what has transpired . I was doing Poeta in New York with the company of Blanca Li, with Carmen Linares, and the end of that book is Son de Negros en Cuba. When we finished that tour in 2010, I went to Cuba looking for Lorca’s footsteps. That’s where the writing of this project began.

A journey to seek that light?

Yes. Lorca apart from existential conflicts and what led him to go to the Americas and flee due to misunderstandings, both in love and with Buñuel and Dalí, he arrived in New York and was a first-person witness to the crash of 29 with all that it entailed. carries. He went to Cuba as the end of that trip, which was to give some lectures and at the end he stayed for three months, and there he reconnected with his light, with his Andalusia, with that joy, that special syncretism that happens in Cuba.

Coincidentally, Carmen Linares opens the Olite Festival this year.

It is a wonderful coincidence. We get along very well, we have a lot of ties, and opening the festival for both of us is beautiful. I do not personally know the town of Olite, they have spoken wonders to me, but I have good friends from the performing arts in that land who I know will come to see us and it will be very beautiful.

Returning to Cuba, the show travels through all those Lorca cities, there is New York, there is Havana, there is Madrid …

Yes, we get into the life and work of Lorca since his birth in the Vega de Granada, in Fuente Vaqueros; his time in Madrid, the contact with the Student Residence and meeting Buñuel and Dalí, with whom he had encounters and disagreements … From Madrid, with that disagreement with Buñuel and Dalí, they went to Paris, but he did. in passing, from Paris to London and then to New York. We do the poem Office and Denunciation with a spoken word that was born precisely in those years. There we have our interpretation of the spoken word, which was born with jazz poetry in the United States at that time and was later cultivated by authors of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and incorporated jazz and improvisational rhythms. And from there we go to Cuba, to reconnect with the light.

Does the trip reach a destination?

It is open for the viewer to draw their own conclusions. Above all, not to dwell on the tragedy, beyond the fact that we are aware that he was murdered and that we must call him by his name. But we want to reclaim that light and that halo and for us it continues to be alive in its poetry in its dramatic literature, in its way of being in the world.

What do you experience when playing Lorca, when he feels for a moment?

My first experience of feeling like Lorca was at the Poet in New York with Carmen Linares. Of course, there he was experiencing a Lorca with all the intellectual load and reflection. I had the need to go to that other more vital Lorca and that is why I went to Cuba. After so many years, I do not intend to make a character that is Lorca, I try to get his words through me and say them from the purest honesty that I can. I like that their words pass through me, that they pass through the filter of my skin, of my reason, and communicate them in the purest way. The figure of Lorca, due to its versatility, is interpreted by three people in this proposal.

How do you divide it?

Nerea Cordero, who is the singing actress, plays the part of Lorca that is connected to the female universe. He did quite a lot of research on the nannies he was encountering across the country because he wanted to understand how the women of his country slept their children. Then there is Lorca with that musical sensitivity that Javier Galiana interprets. And I play that Lorca who is more connected with the land, with secular culture, with the roots. It is so multifaceted and so immense that it would be impossible for me to want to play Lorca by myself.

The work contains another small piece, in turn. What is it?

It is like a meta-theater, which reconnects with that boy Lorca who grew up in the Vega de Granada and who was originally going to be a pianist and musician. His first intuition was closer to music, until some blackjack puppets came to town, his head was opened and there his passion for theater began. We make a piece of blackjack puppet theater within the piece itself. He and Falla had an attempt to make a company of blackjack puppets all over Europe … they actually did a single performance at the poet’s house, they invited the children of the neighborhood. But starting from that unfinished and little-known material, there I also take the license to write an altarpiece of Don Cristobical Colón and Isabélica la Católica. We make a reinterpretation of the origins of that Granada that the same year that it was conquered by the Catholic Monarchs, the Moors who had been there for 800 years were expelled. It was also the year that Columbus arrived in the Americas, and the first syncretism occurs in which the Earth speaks as well. On the second Columbian voyage, sugar cane was brought to the Americas, and they brought tobacco. Curiously, the Vega de Granada is today full of tobacco and the island of Cuba is full of sugar cane cultivation.

To young people who do not know Lorca, where would you recommend that they enter that world?

The universe of rappers, improvised poetry, spoken word … what Lorca wrote 90 years ago has such a devastating validity there that although it seems that Poet in New York is something very sensible and very complex, I think it is perfectly recommended for young people. Approaching Lorca’s lectures, which is something unusual, reading the lecture on lullabies is something that connects you with something very primitive and that we all have. It is a very affordable read.

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