Grand Duke
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From the performance notes presented at Festival d'Avignon --
Angélica Liddell uses all the methods of theatre in which beauty, eroticism, and death are inextricably intertwined to delve into the deepest recesses of human nature. A way to try to say what cannot be said. With total sincerity and explosive power, the director, based in Madrid, exposes herself to question herself. And through her heartrending cry of distress, and her deeply human cry of hope, she tries to bring about the triumph of the law of poetry over the law of the State. Terribly disturbed by the violence of Issei Sagawa, the Japanese student who killed and ate his classmate, and by that of the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks of November 2015 in Paris, she proposes with ¿ Qué haré yo con esta espada ? (And what will I do with this sword?) a journey from Tokyo to Paris and back, in order to free, inside this fictional world, the homicidal instincts often buried deep within us. With her companions Hölderlin, Cioran, Mishima, and Nietzsche, she goes back to the origins of tragedy and seeks to transform on the stage real violence into mythological violence. Using her power as an actress to express the fragility of desires and do away with bourgeois self-righteous morals, Angélica Liddell leads us to places where tranquillity does not exist.
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In the centre of the second part of Angélica Liddell’s »Trilogy of the Infinite« are two acts of archaic violence in modern-day Paris: the 1981 murder by Japanese exchange student Issei Sagawa of his classmate Renée Hartevelt, whose body parts he then proceeded to cook and eat; and the terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015. In a staged act of rebellion against rationalism, Liddell searches in the irrational violence being repressed by this rationalism for the creation of an awareness of individual existence and the buried essence of poetry in cannibalism and terrorism: »The talent of striking out the heart of life at a blow, as the Indian takes off a scalp«, according to an aphorism from Thoreau. »How can real-life violence be transformed into poetic violence to bring us into contact with our true nature – through acts against nature? (Nietzsche) We must return to the origins of tragedy in the way scientists seek the origins of the universe by forcing protons to collide, this beautiful violence of the battle between particles, the origin of matter. If we had to develop a classic narrative, then it would be a story of a woman who has, since birth, wished to kill others and herself and, on the path of fiction, is releasing her murderous tendencies, her authentic longings, until she finally becomes convinced that, by reason of her spiritual relationship with the horrific, the cannibals, she is in the position to produce carnage, real carnage solely with the force and violence of her thoughts and her desires – like an injured mentalist drenched in pig’s blood carrying on her shoulders like a grim fate the bodies from Paris.«
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"In the same way that scientists investigate the origin of the universe," says the author, "by colliding protons, that beautiful violence of the battle between particles, it is necessary to return to the origin of the tragedy, to discover the strength, the energy, the nerves." , even before the feeling appeared, that pure and nameless sensation.
What will I do with this sword? It is articulated from two violent events – the cannibal crime of Issei Sagawa and the massacre of November 13, 2015 in Paris – and is born from the confrontation between poetry and the law or, rather, from the confrontation between the prose of the State and the outburst of the spirit.
«Angélica Liddell, angel and demon, shadow and light, ecstasy and hell. Furious, rabid, devastating. And tender, luminous, dazzling at all times with her happy and sincere laugh. » Fabienne Darge, Le Monde
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If you are looking for a performance to tell you a nice little story, all tied up with pretty ribbons and bows, you will be just as perplexed by the amazing works of Florentina Holzinger and Pablo Rotemberg.
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