TEXT+DIRECTOR: LAILA RIPOLL
Premiere
Canal Theaters / Red Room
February 2020
A co-production with the Community of Madrid
EQUIPMENT
text and address
Laila Ripoll
Cast
Nadia - Zhila Azadeh
Jacinta - Cristina Bertol
Fortunata - Eva Caballero
Mauricia - Yolanda Fernandez
Maxi - Julio Montanana Hidalgo
Benito - Juan Carlos Pertusa
Juan - Jorge Yumar
Scenography
Arturo Martin Burgos
Lightning
Juanjo Llorens
Locker room
Ana Montes
Music
Alberto Granados
video scene
Alvaro Luna and Elvira Ruiz Zurita
Choreography
Andoni Larrabeiti
assistant director
Hector del Saz
One hundred years have passed since the death of Benito Pérez Galdós. 2020 is the Galdos year. An exceptional poet, journalist, playwright and novelist, Galdós had a life as exciting as his novels. Always surrounded by women and influenced by them, his older sisters, his friends, his lovers, his mother... he was a great creator of female characters who he endowed with flesh, character and soul like no one, until now, had done. in the Spanish novel. Fortunata y Benito is a tribute to the female characters of Galdós, a visit from the 21st century to Galdosian Madrid that perhaps is not that far away. Laila Ripoll will compose this new show in her first collaboration with LaJoven .
Author's Notes
We always imagine Galdós as an old man with a moustache, but the truth is that there was a time when Don Benito was a tall, seductive and well-built young man who made bow ties and lived the bohemia and the Madrid nightlife. There was also a time when he dreamed on a streetcar, when he was stunned when he attended a revolution or desolate when Prim was assassinated.
Don Benito is endless, huge and exciting. Suffice it to say that he is the greatest novelist in Spanish of the contemporary age, that without him no one would be the same. Fortunata y Jacinta is, possibly, his magnum opus, the greatest novel in Spanish of the 19th century (with the permission of don Leopoldo), the most modern, the most mestizo, and the most colossal.
Fortunata and Jacinta , like Fortunata and Benito , takes place in Madrid, a messy, dirty city, full of life, generous and open, always fascinating. Starting from "the novel on the tram" we will arrive at our Fortunata, but not before adding a splash of National Episodes , something from Tristana , a pinch of Memoirs of a forgetful person , a few drops of Misericordia , a scent of "the disinherited" and a generous amount of music and dancing.
Fortunata, Benito and Madrid, urban where they exist, a novel that transforms before our eyes and that gives way to a modern, rogue, contemporary and vital Madrid in which, perhaps, we can find a Juanito in a restaurant, a Fortunata in a portal, a Jacinta in a cafeteria, a Mauricia on any sidewalk or a Maxi when turning any corner.
Laila Ripoll
Cast
The space by Arturo Martín Burgos
Scenic space with a contemporary atmosphere and cut based on clean and simple geometric shapes and lines. Light colors in the range of gray and raw on a white background cyclorama and two black lateral volumes that reinforce the "skyline" of the composition.
The idea is developed from a construction scaffolding, so abundant in the current urban landscape. In the upper part, four meters high, Madrid's rooftops are suggested with hanging clothes as the only figurative element in the design.
The access stairs to the upper part of the structure, when backlit, are discovered among the suggestive geometric pattern of the tubes, through gobelins (which function as mesh scaffolding). These same fabrics serve, on the front, as a projection space.
The floor is made up of fragments of the Madrid street map. A kind of urban showcase whose pieces could refer us, indirectly and subliminally, to the instability and fragility of the lives of the protagonists that lead to their tragic destiny.
The music of Alberto Granados