AMADORA

The year’s Festival de Otoño is an excellent opportunity to joint artistic venture between two great theatre artists. On one side of the duo, we have Miren Iza, Spanish singer-songwriter and the heart and soul of the Tulsa musical group, owner of a very genuine vocal register and a compositional lucidity that elevates the auteur pop to interesting heights. And the other half of the duo is María Velasco, writer, playwright, producer and stage director, is a frontier voice that finds it difficult to fit into the -sometimes too rigid- schemes of the Spanish theatre system. Miren and María, both great lyricists, if we extend the term to playwriting, which is also done with lyrics, and with tasty conflict, like the songs of one and the plays of the other. Iza and Velasco, two great charioteers of their destiny, firmly grasp the reins even if only to ride over doubts and leave the road stitched with a melancholic anecdote full of sense, disguised depth and fine irony. Intelligence and talent. The duo takes on a third dimension with the choreographer Josefina Gorostiza and a fourth and a fifth, with the guarantee and peace of mind that comes from knowing that behind the production is Teatro Kamikaze. At the head of the cast of actresses, there is Socorro Anadón’s solvency and experience, without underestimating the great Carmen Mayordomo and Celia Bermejo.

And how is it that Miren and María have come together? What do they want to talk about? About mothers. Virginia Woolf once said: “For we think back through our mothers if we are women.” Amadorais not aTulsa album nor a María Velasco play, it is neither a concert nor musical theatre. Do we have to define it? They are songs composed by Miren and the lyrics written by María, who also directs the piece. It is music’s marriage to monologues, sound spaces to dialogues, actions to atmospheres, putting "the focus on those women trapped in the invisible, universally needed and ignored, who claim indirectly, with pain, tension and anxiety, the respect they have been denied", they explain.

Amadora is a heroine to walk around the house, always at the mercy of others' desires, always ready, lest she suddenly finds that no one needs her. One of the crooks of the pieces of the piece is Wendy Syndrome, a psychology term used to describe a woman who is empathetic, nurturing and even self-sacrificing to the point where she may act like a mother to her romantic partner. This selflessness seems like a natural vocation. Isn’t that what makes a mother? Something similar happens with pain, another focal point of the work. It is a silent companion that stigmatises so many mature women as undiagnosed patients. There is a lot of pain, something which Miren Iza knows all too well about. Not only is she an artist, but she is also a psychiatrist. Women are so misunderstood, poorly studied and sidelined in the grand scheme of things, but they are medicated to the point of addiction, so glory to the big pharmaceuticals.

There is a third thematic axis that has to do with the roles of the biological woman common in the traditional family institution and its social representations, roles that this work intends to deconstruct and reimagine. “Scrubber, nanny, general medical professional, shaman, personal shopper, a machine to run errands, archivist, dietician, secretary and all-around girl, wife and mother. This is Amadora's life underpinned with the motto “I can’t complain”. From one day to the next, pain comes into her life and Amadora feels like a child to a stuck lady: a tired and aching lady". This work is dedicated to, “the women we were going to look even more like from the age of thirty-three onwards. The women we were obliged to love regardless of whether we admired them. To the women who were going to leave us a cursed burden, disguised as instinct. Women with whom there was an obligation to reconcile to be able to care, even to love, without committing hara-kiri two or three times a day".

Some lines composed by Miren in the performance: "I'll rock in diazpam's arms, tramadol will whisper to me, I'll curl up in bed like an animal, until the lion tires and leaves me be.”

A small fragment from María Velasco’s text: "I'm afraid of becoming commonplace despite having a name of my own. There are names that are a corrective. Worse than original sin or toothache or earache: Soledad, Angustias, Dolores, Socorro... Amadora* is no better.”

*These are common Spanish names for woman referring to loneliness (Soledad), sorrow (Angustias), pain (Dolores), and help when in distress (Socorro). Amadora has a more positive connotation of love as it comes from the Latin for love Amor. The names are a play on words, in Spanish, reflecting the realities of women.