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If life is the tense and constant friction between eros and Thanatos, Angélica Liddell’s theatre and more than any other work Liebestod is a scenic poem dedicated to love death: a spiral that cannot be resolved. It was only natural she fell in love with Juan Belmonte’s figure (1892-1962), the man who fought the way he was and the way he fought. Just like Angélica, Belmonte did not know how to live outside his stage and his clairvoyant existence only made sense in the bullring. Bullfighting is the most quintessential form of dance between love and death. Its metaphor is perfect to express Liddell’s message. It takes from the stuttering and suicidal Sevillian, known in his time as Pasmo de Triana, his spiritual sense. She says: "The theatre, devoid of God, of inspiration, of ritual, is worthless. The theatre, such as bullfighting is for the matador , is a spiritual exercise where it is necessary to forget about one’s physical existence". This is the earthly renunciation that is also present in Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, the music that best accompanies this eternal dance between love and death. It is about eternity, the anachronistic time of art.
Liebestod, the title of the climax of Richard Wagner’s opera, literally means “love death” or “love till death”. This work was created because another passionate person provided the necessary structure. Milo Rau invited Liddell to create the third part of the series History/ies of Theatre , a project sponsored by Ghant’s Dutch theatre NTGent, which has been going on since 2018. It is a chance for an artist to tackle a new staging in dialogue with her own story. The premiere of Liebestod took place in the summer of 2021 at the Festival d'Avignon and a whole string of bullfighting similes could be used here to describe Liddell's new success in the mekkah of European theatre, but we'll spare you. The fervor with which the artist is received in France is well known. Two years later, she is back in Madrid and again at the Festival de Otoño, which maintains an unwavering commitment to the exhibition of her creations since La casa de la fuerza in 2009, a work that after its subsequent passage in Avignon opened the doors to the great European stages. Liebestod sold out and received standing ovations at its eight performances at the Odéon Theatre in Paris in the autumn of 2022. It has also premiered at the Schaubühne in Berlin, Brussels, Prague, Lausanne, Barcelona, and the iconic Dramaten in Stockholm, as well as being nominated for best show in Italy in 2022.
Glossing Angélica Liddell’s work is a sterile endeavour doomed to a parasitic existence and no one ever improves on what she herself says about her own work: "My works are always made at a crossroads, there where one encounters the ghosts of the hanged and the deserters of the law with the force of the unconscious. Belmonte and Wagner intersect to talk about a history of theatre that is the history of my roots and the history of my abysses. They intersect to give voice to my darkness and the origin of my works. The sky falls to Earth and Hell rises to God’s thrown. I am not so much concerned with what can be understood, but with the incomprehensible, with wonder, with the Epiphany in the face of the inexplicable. I am not interested in the reproduction of reality but of the real, the invisible. The title itself explains it, paraphrasing Francis Bacon: The smell of blood does not leave my eyes ”.
It is necessary to banish the anecdotal to approach Liddell's work as a spectator, because she is still one of the few artists in the world who creates against her present and seeks transfiguration on stage, which is far from the formality of complying with the cultural elitism of a European capital. The passion and spirituality presented, which always seeks to draw the face of God and, like Sisyphus, fails and starts again, requires surrendering as she does. But is this possible? If I say that it is like violent sex, all the alarms go off. It should not be forgotten that what happens on stage is sacred and real and appeals to the sublime’s spirit, without giving it the letter of truth beyond the building’s walls. The stage is a love land, thought and delight and only intelligence can discriminate the real danger of poetic violence and give way to an emotion that, descending to hell, conquers the sky.
