De Castro / Folguera / Troya / Zaragozá
| Director: | María Folguera |
| Text: | María Folguera and excerpts from the The Life of St Teresa and Meditations on the Song of Songs by Saint Teresa of Jesus |
| A project started by: | Julia de Castro and María Folguera |
| On stage: | Julia de Castro and Carlos Troya |
| On stage painting: | Eva Zaragozá Marquina |
| Lighting: | Irene Cantero and Víctor Colmenero Mir |
| Wardrobe: | Carmen 17 |
| Production assistant: | Eva Luna García-Mauriño |
“Julia de Castro’s presence is a constant pleasure”.Javier Vallejo, El País
Teresa of Jesus lived many lives. She divided and multiplied: politician, patient, lover, traveller, ascetic, warrior… She spread herself over the width and breadth of the world, until she was exhausted and anguished. As artist María Folguera states, ‘we want to ask her if it is possible to be one and many. To fully surrender oneself and continue to be’
La guerra según Santa Teresa (War According to Saint Teresa) started as a question and turned into an inquiry surrounding the personage of Teresa of Jesus, a 16th century woman who became a literary, historical and religious icon. Musician and actress Julia de Castro (half of the De la Puríssima duet—known for rescuing the ‘cuplé’ genre from oblivion and dusting it off to a jazz beat—and performer in recent successful works including Esto no es La Casa de Bernarda Alba and the short Anatomía de una criminal) and playwright and director María Folguera defend and rewrite their relationship with Teresa of Jesus with this creation that is now coming to the 36th Autumn Festival.
Folguera’s original text—atheist and daughter of atheists, as she defines herself—starts from the desire to understand Teresa’s experience via excerpts from the famous The Life of St Teresa and Meditations on the Song of Songs. However, there are other guests at the table: What would Simone de Beauvoir think of all this? In what ways do chivalry novels resemble series like The Wire o The Sopranos?
The stage is a tableau and, like players, we journey through Teresa’s life and oeuvre, part by part, piece by piece. And not in vain, as when she died, the saint was chopped into bits and distributed throughout the Christian world. On the stage, as well as performers Julia de Castro and Carlos Troya, during each show visual artist Eva Zaragozá Marquina creates a series of drawings on the life of Teresa. This work, premiering at the Autumn Festival, is a revision of the production that premiered in 2013 at the Festival Gigante by the Cervantes Society in Madrid.