Galician documentary theater joins Teatre Lliure with 'Curva España'

"Curva España is the recovery of an oral transmission of a local story about an unsolved mystery.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
29 November 2022 Tuesday 09:02
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Galician documentary theater joins Teatre Lliure with 'Curva España'

"Curva España is the recovery of an oral transmission of a local story about an unsolved mystery. It is located between history and legend and between the screen and the stage." This is how the Galician company Chévere presents the new production in Barcelona, ​​which aims to reflect on the cultural construction of the nation and on emptied Spain. The scenic proposal is based on offering a live set with two actors and two video operators, speaking Galician and Spanish, from December 7 to 18 at the Teatre Lliure de Gràcia.

"We were captivated by a local story from Verín, the Galician town that has kept the legend of the death of José Fernández-España alive over the years," explained Xron (the stage name of Xesús Ron), playwright and director, at the presentation of the work On May 26, 1927, José Fernández-España drove his car into a ravine in A Bouciña Redonda, in the municipality of Rios (Ourense), while carrying out a study for the southern variant of the Puebla de Sanabria-Ourense railway line. . "A week after his death, the railway project was canceled and that part of Galicia was never communicated with either Portugal or Castilla León," the playwright continued.

The residents of the area did not forget the facts and began to develop their own version of events in which they maintained that the death of Spain was not an accident, but a murder under the will of the economic elites of the area. Thus, the legend of "the death of Spain" was passed orally from generation to generation until today.

"We were fascinated by the strength of the oral tradition and also by the name of the deceased, Spain. So we decided to take advantage of documentary theater as a tool to present our version of events and, in addition, offer more layers of reflection on how it has been built the Spanish nation from these past decisions", added Ron, since, with the death of the engineer, the most expensive and most difficult railway route of all the Spanish lines was prioritized, and the inhabited part was left unconnected , more productive and frontier of the territory.

In this way, the playwright has emphasized that, even having carried out rigorous documentation work in Verín, the town where the legend has been kept alive, Chévere has not maintained his version of events. The company does not understand documentary theater as a literal transmission of facts, but instead mixes this discipline with fiction and autofiction. In this way, they achieve a fresh version with more layers of reflection to connect the past with the present. "It is part of our vocation to make a theater committed to historical memory and with a political intention", Xron concluded.

It is not the first time that the Galician company steps on the stage of the Teatre Lliure. Last year they presented the play N.E.V.E.R.M.O.R.E, with one of the performances in Galician and which had the most audience. In this way, Curva España will offer all its performances in Galician and Spanish, and can be seen from December 7 to 18 at the Teatre Lliure de Gràcia.