En un lugar de la Mancha

Published in the journal ADE Teatro No. 107, November-December 2005, in the dossier “El Quijote a escena”

In those places where the roads narrow and you have to pull onto the verge, a lorry works its way through the winding geography of Castilla-La Mancha and settles for a few hours in the square, on the threshing floors, or simply at the entrance to the village because it cannot get through between one street and the next. In twenty minutes a set of hydraulics raises the roof and the side panels, turning this lorry into a stage — a corral de comedias, to be precise — with everything needed to give a performance, from dressing rooms to fly bars, projectors, acoustic screens and a long list besides. Sixty-one towns and villages in this region will enjoy, this summer, thanks to the companies Armar Teatro (Toledo) & Falsaria de Indias (Albacete) and to the Fundación IV Centenario, the production entitled “En un lugar de la Mancha”, which stages an adaptation of three of Cervantes’s interludes… That is the result; let us take the story up from the beginning.

The idea is a simple one: to bring theatre to the places it seldom reaches or, at worst, simply never reaches. The thought that this production may be many people’s first contact with theatre makes your hair stand on end — but you also think that audiences have changed a great deal in recent years, that their cultural habits bear no resemblance to those of the past, that news travels fast out here, that the train goes by at full speed and the roads carry us in no time at all to sprawling shopping centres, bargain-basement cinemas and virtual paradises that blind our senses and lull, when they do not offend, our drowsy intellect.

Villages are no longer what they were. The audience, like it or not, has changed. We have changed.

How do you reach such different people, gathered together almost by chance? One because he is from the village, another because of a girl, some out of sheer habit, a man from Valencia who lives in Madrid and another from Cantabria who lives in Seville, a girl born here and her friend, from Valladolid… And all of them, in the end, are going to take part as spectators in the performance… How many different readings, how many cultures, how much richness in so small a place, how much of an audience… Some have never been to the theatre, others a couple of times, some go every week and many have never even given it a thought.

What do we do, where will the performance take place, with what technical and human resources? How do we make up for the lack of a decent stage? How do we manage to ensure that in every town the production is seen exactly as it was designed, avoiding those hateful “adaptations” to the lighting design, the set and a long list besides?

These are the premises a stage project called “En un lugar de la Mancha” set out with. Two years ago Iñigo Benítez, Llanos Campos and Rosa Herrera, of Armar Teatro and Falsaria de Indias, called me to direct a production that would tour tiny villages over the summer. “We’ve got a lorry! And we want you to direct a production for us.” I accepted, delighted, without a moment’s hesitation.

Coinciding with the centenary of Don Quixote, and faced with the foreseeable avalanche of productions built around that character, we decided to pay a small tribute to his author by staging a carefully chosen selection of interludes: “La guarda cuidadosa”, “El viejo celoso” and “La cueva de Salamanca”. The starting point was settled.

The same old question, the blessed question, the tiresome one that whispered to me between the sheets, took shape with every reading: what do I rescue today? How do I bring onto the stage those situations that are still alive in our society? There is always a commitment to the original text, but we cannot forget our commitment to the contemporary audience. I needed an approach that would hold the scene at a distance and present it from a new angle, so that these extraordinary stage toys could be told here and now, across the distance the centuries impose on us, without losing the wonderful life Cervantes knew how to breathe into them. That is how I came to a commitment to form, to rhythm, to an absolute cleanness of movement, and so, from a distance, to telling a story that more often than not belongs to the past. Because form too is a powerful tool: it lets us tell what the text keeps quiet or leaves sleeping, it sharpens the intentions and reveals new shades that the dust of the years buries and distorts, and it offers us a renewed view to set beside the yellowed page.

The words of Heinrich von Kleist are still going round in my head: in his essay “On the Marionette Theatre” he sets out a series of aesthetic principles that, far from staying with the puppets, reach into a poetic and philosophical dimension and so establish a precise relationship with contemporary art. Watching the actors’ work from that springboard is what defines the aesthetic of the performance. In this way any movement by one actor is perceived by the rest, prompting new movements, new variations in the actors’ different centres of gravity and in the overall composition, and so opening up different fields of reading. The cleanness of the gesture, of the action, has to be impeccable, so as to define that new meaning which appears in the performance freed of the bonds and the tedium the passing years bring with them. Once that step is taken, we arrive inevitably at work with masks, because masks let us play with apparent reality and take it apart; they create another order and establish differences that alter the many relationships at play with the audience. Engracia Cruz designed them.

The interludes drink from many sources and absorb every artistic discipline they come across, and so there is no doing without the dance and the music that bind together the different pieces making up the production. The music was composed by Mariano Lozano, who worked shoulder to shoulder with the actors (Carmen Arribas, Cristina Penco, Mª Ángeles González, Rosa María Herrera, Alfredo Martínez and Chete Guzmán) to bring to life, in song and percussion, with no artifice of any kind, live and in the moment, the songs Miguel de Cervantes wrote for these interludes.

The stage and set space, built by Ciro, is a corral de comedias, a two-storey courtyard playhouse six metres high with an eight-metre opening, which makes it possible to perform the piece on a lorry with all its dignity and without a single change in any of the towns, whatever technical resources each of the different villages or places may have.

The simple lighting, built into the lorry itself, is based on footlights and lightly supported by front projectors. The design was by Iñigo Benítez.

The costumes, designed by Liv Ortiz and made by Mónica Ramos, sit between two waters: they set out from classical patterns in order to deform them and treat them according to the convention established by the actors’ work and by the general aesthetic.

Given the age of the text being staged, one of my concerns was to make clear from the very first moment of the performance that what was being represented had some bearing on us, today’s spectators, watching a story of the past comfortably from our seats. The critical position of the spectator before the stage is something that troubles me, and I did not want, and still do not want, to give the sleepers the slightest chance.

The solution starts from the jesters of old, and also from those popular figures such as the botarga and so many others that lie sleeping in the villages of Castile, waiting for the kiss of some historian to bring them out of oblivion. It is these characters, to the rhythm of a cowbell, who have spoken to us since the beginning of time and who speak now to offer us a text of yesterday performed today. They are therefore the ones charged with closing the circle and reminding us once again that the piece is still alive, that tomorrow differs little from yesterday.

The rehearsal process took place on a farm in Camarenilla (Toledo). We needed somewhere that would let us concentrate, with a rehearsal room, bedrooms for the actors and the directing team, a kitchen, room to walk, and that would let us work on the lorry itself during the final weeks.

On 17 June there was a preview on the farm. The tour began the next day. “En un lugar de la Mancha” sets out on its way.