Angélica Liddell / Atra Bilis
| Text, direction, stage design, costume: | Angélica Liddell |
| Starring: | Oliver Laxe, Angélica Liddell and Camilo Silva |
| In cooperation with: | Elzbieta Koslacz, Beatriz Álvarez, Laura Jabois, Raquel Fernández, Blanca Martínez, Olga Redondo and Amor Prior |
“At the hour of our death, we are all sons and daughters”.Angélica Liddell
Taking Deleuze’s treaty Presentación de Sacher-Masoch. Lo frío y lo cruel (Presentation of Sacher-Masoch. The cold and
the cruel) as a starting point, the daughter faces her father’s death and
the problem of similarity. Thanks to this masochistic act with the
biological father in the prelude of death, the daughter becomes a
Christological mother (Mary), as developed by Deleuze, and takes the role
of a paradoxical executioner, since the punishment adds the benefit of
knowledge and beauty in a cruel itinerary, which goes from the body
massacred by old age to a black mysticism, that is, to the contemplation of
a God perhaps non-existent, but, in the end, an obsessing ghost. And, to
this end, the daughter becomes a hunter of bears, wolves and lambs; the
daughter-mother-executioner fulfils the masochistic vision of the world and
signs the contract with the father, who is nothing more than a metaphor for
the original guilt that culminates in aesthetics.
The journey begins with the body, continues with the ideas, reaches the
sublime in art and, finally, culminates in God, that is, it is a path
towards mystery. The search for the ideal and the beautiful traces a path
marked by a represented cruelty that allows us to think about the
unrepresentable. Therefore, masochism is a purely spiritual act, which
comes from the dilemma between matter and soul, between the expiration of
the living body (the natural beauty) and the eternity of the beautiful (the
artistic beauty, as Hegel states); it is a transcendent search through the
ritual sexualisation of death, a desire for atonement and punishment that
abjures the similarity with the father (the creator) in order to reaffirm
it. And also to reaffirm the infinite solitude in the face of the
indemonstrable, the unattainable and the incomprehensible, focusing on the
silence of God, on the similarity between the object and its aesthetic
representation, on the similarity between the father and the son.
At the hour of our death, we are all sons and daughters. This work is a
vain attempt to make the invisible and the unintelligible visible. A
lunatic order under which the river of anguish and the need to be loved
flows. True freedom emanates from the acceptance of slavery. The masochist,
in his own way, by reversing the pain and pleasure relationship, removes
the law of men to establish the mythical one; he breaks the masochistic
contract established by God by signing a contract on earth. This is Hegel's
proposal: "The realisation of reason is tragic, as Christ's sacrifice shows
us”.
The world premiere of Una costilla sobre la mesa: Padre (A rib on
the table: Father) took place on 10 January 2020 in La Colline de París.