Carlota Ferrer
| Directed by: | Carlota Ferrer |
| Set design: | Mónica Borromello |
| Costume design: | Ana López |
| Audiovisual design: | Jaime Dezcallar |
| Sound design: | Sandra Vicente Translation: José Manuel Mora |
| Cast: | Una: Irene Escolar Ray: José Luis Torrijo |
“The gifted David Harrower's Blackbird promises to be the most powerful drama of the season…masterly, mesmerizing…extraordinary…a miracle”.New York Times
For the first time, the Festival de Otoño a Primavera commissions one of our youngest and most brilliant stage directors, Carlota Ferrer, to stage one of the most controversial and disputed plays of recent years: Blackbird, a contemporary tragedy by Scottish author David Harrower that tests the limits of what is morally acceptable in a love affair between an older man and a young girl. Coproduced by El Pavón Teatro Kamikaze.
Every era deals with the same themes, which remained contained within the rooms that each time period allows us to occupy. Ibsen conceived The Master Builder in 1892 as a spacious and elevated space in which an older man is visited by younger women from his past. In 1912, Thomas Mann wrote Death in Venice and discovered eternal beauty among the infested waters of a plague-ridden city and a tormented old age. Nabokov brought his Lolita into the world in 1955, converting forbidden desire into literary genre. In 2005, Scottish author David Harrower revisited the age-old story of forbidden love by narrowing the limits of space and using characters whose hearts still beat to the ancient story of unresolved love. But who among us does not still carry a torch for an old love?
This theme –the encounter between older man and younger girl– has reached us through the ages as a real and poetic echo that shakes up the spectator, confronting audiences with what is morally acceptable during calm, politically correct times. We approach Blackbird as a contemporary tragedy in which the spectator plays the role of moral judge. The real conflict is not onstage but rather between the stage and the audience. And that means being able to recognise oneself in uncomfortable places, where one thing happens in the play and another happens inside those who attend the performance. Has the protagonist, Una, come to ask Ray –her former love– for an explanation after years of absence? Who would have thought that she has actually come back to find out why he left her?
The vision of Carlota Ferrer and her artistic collective Draft.inn –their latest creations, including Nadadores Nocturnos (Night Swimmers), Fortune Cookies and La Habitación Luminosa (The Lighted Room), are characterised by their artistic beauty, the literary quality of their scripts and the overlapping of the collective’s range of artistic disciplines make it possible for spectators to immerse themselves in a powerful emotional experience– gives us a first-person point of view of Blackbird, the characters like two mice trapped in a room. Both Una and Ray are watched over by the external social order as if they were part of a human experiment. Artistic poetry elevates realism to a place where emotions are no longer linked to the rational but to the sensory and emotional. Love versus crime. Law versus nature. The desire in rejection. The longing for revenge. Like in Blackbird, the quest for beauty that dwells in the dark is the recurrent theme of Carlota Ferrer's performances. Her plays remind us that wounds are meant to be looked after. Cherished.