APERTURA DE PROCESO: ACTOS 1 Y 2

Alberto Cortés is once again at the Festival de Otoño, to the delight of all, being one of the most interesting voices of the contemporary Spanish stage. The artist from Malaga lets us in on a new creation process that will come together in 2024. We are not going to see a finished work, but an opportunity "halfway between what is talked about and what is performed, neither a work nor a lecture, but rather a way of making it felt out loud," says Alberto in a brief text he sent us next to Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. What is he up to? Well, other times he has done something similar, he has let us see parts of his creations before finishing them. But this opening act seems different, and I wanted to know more, so I called him.

ALVARO VICENTE. I really love the text you’ve given us, but I’d like to go a little deeper on some things. What do you propose to do with this opening process?

ALBERTO CORTÉS. Well, as is logical, I like hearing feedback, but deep down I'm also looking for what's going on inside of me. For me, these openings are very important to understand the piece itself. They’re also important to know what I am doing and what is happening. For that, I need the external gaze of someone who sits in front of me and looks because the work I do communicates a lot with the audience. It is very open to the public and it looks for the audience's eyes. I need that gaze.

ALVARO VICENTE. At the beginning of this text, you say: "I'm thinking about how to build a myth that will serve as an encouragement and cure for the abuses we subject ourselves to in relationships.” Pretty blunt, isn't it?

ALBERTO CORTÉS. Yes, I know that sentence is like a loaded gun. I've been working on the table for a long time, on the concept, on the reading and on the writing above all, and at the end of the day you try to condense the ideas in a clear way. I am at a moment when trying to make a synopsis is driving me up the wall. For me, the ideal would be that everything could be told in a sentence, without theorising everything so much.

ALVARO VICENTE. But isn't the idea of building a myth assuming too great a power?

ALBERTO CORTÉS. Yes, of course, but it is about building a myth in my own way. Creating a myth or narrative can also be very brief or very basic. The myth that we are generating, that of the Analphabet ghost, seemed to me a very naive starting point, very naive, with which to begin building something, a legend, a narrative.

ALVARO VICENTE. You speak specifically about "glimpsing forms of queer wanting that do not again put sex at the centre of the equation.” Perhaps also in this field of queer love there is a need for a new mythology?

ALBERTO CORTÉS. That’s exactly what I am saying. First, because it is a myth that comes to dismantle or to reflect on whether the "couple" system can also be an oppression. We did not have a myth before this figure or we had it but not from this point of fantasy, of narration, of the story. It is not a plea against sex, mind you, it is a plea for there to be more things besides just sex, or for there to be another way of relating, or for sex not to become a something it shouldn’t be... It is about how to put care at the centre of it all and not turn sex into an engine that can go over people's heads.

ALVARO VICENTE. You had to look to German romanticism and Andalusian idiosyncrasy to imagine this new mythology. Are these two worlds closer than they might seem?

ALBERTO CORTÉS. I am talking about the late 18th century’s German romantic movement and going into the early nineteenth century. There are many who agree with me on this, but we have not ceased to be romantic. And there is something in German romantic expression feeling and something in the sentimental or emotional expression that is present in the southern Spanish culture, where I am from. There are certain songs, certain tearing expressions, that I don't think are so far apart a priori, I don't think they are incompatible. But it's true that this whole world of German romantic literature started to interest me because of this destiny thing, the landscape, the journey, how to find one's place in the world, all this dramatic stuff. The relationship between what is Natural and all, which is very present in the piece, the sublime, that which surpasses you...

ALVARO VICENTE. Why do you call the ghost Analphabet?

ALBERTO CORTÉS. Because it is related to the emotional and not to the theoretical. It represents a need to return to what does not have much logic and much reason and to give value to something that cannot be expressed with the written arts. And I also needed to emphasize how not to always justify the couple from a theoretical framework. The couple should be this and not that, everything that we are generating now with the theoretical calculation of the couple. This mythology comes to say that, well, maybe we don't need so much theory, but also to listen, to give it value, a place for everything that has to do with a couple’s emotions.

ALVARO VICENTE. "Between what is conversed and what is performed, neither work nor conference"....

ALBERTO CORTÉS. Yes, this is what I have in mind for Madrid, but I have never done it. I like the idea of explaining and doing, to expose a little more the places from which I face my creation, between what I have done and what I have said.

ALVARO VICENTE. Maybe I capture this conversation instead of writing a text. Anything else you’d like to add?

ALBERTO CORTÉS. Yes, that it's all a bit of a lie. I'm not here to give lessons on love or to scold anyone. At the end of the day, I am the wounded one. And, more importantly, Luz Prado will surely be with me on stage in the musical part. And that’s it.