The anecdote was told by the director Lluís Pasqual in his book about Lorca: they had to do a recital with Núria Espert in Bogota, La oscura raíz, and she couldn't go. The director of the festival called another actress to rehearse. There was little time and he said to the production team: "To Mr. Pasqual, whatever you need." "One came and I asked him for a bucket of water and two kilos of flour that the actress had to knead. The man left, surprised: 'Two kilos?' After a short while, he returns and says: 'How many are there in the company?' three 'Two kilos, huh?' Yes. I told him I was giving him the money or I was going. 'No, no, you try', he told me", Pasqual recalled with amusement. "After half an hour, the man comes and explains to me: 'Excuse me, for one I got a kilo, the other won't reach me until the afternoon'. I was about to go into a rage, but I said to him: 'What have you understood?' And he answered: 'So flour, what you all ask for when you arrive in Colombia'. 'I really want flour', I pointed out. The man still laughs."
Production managers at theaters and festivals around the world are used to all kinds of requests in order to carry out the works, from hundreds of butterflies to thousands of hamburgers to carpet the floor, or sometimes to own consumption, be it suspicious bottles of whiskey in the technical specifications of the works or the 18 organic eggs demanded by Isabelle Huppert in the dressing room. "There are difficult requests, others unusual and, some, impossible", dissects Marta López-Orós, production director of Teatre Lliure.
And there are names that are repeated time after time as sources of requests, creators such as Rodrigo García, Angélica Liddell, Romeo Castellucci, Jan Fabre... López-Orós recalls an anecdote from Accidens: matar para comer de Rodrigo García, whose performance was banned for animal cruelty because the artist cooked a live lobster live. "We had to find six lobsters with a minimum weight of 2.5 kilos. It was May, worst for seafood, and we toured several fishmongers with the performer of the function to cast lobsters, each with a replacement in case they died before the function. In one, the fishmonger, Victoria, wanted to place a three-kilo lobster for us. The interpreter's response was: 'Victoria, look at him: he's not an actor'. Afterwards, one of the fishmongers refused to sell them to us if it was for a show in which they were killed."
The Lliure production company remembers, in the category of difficult requests, to get volunteers to shave their very long hair live in another production by García. One in each function. He achieved this by appealing to the creator's fans, who had the opportunity to participate in one of his productions. Conversely, for another of his works he had to get bags and bags of hair, so they had to ask a collaborating hairdresser to collect it for months. He also had to provide him with an entire family, father, mother, two children and a grandmother, in a car.
For Angélica Liddell, she had to get nurses to draw blood live on the show La casa de la fuerza. And for Roger Bernat he had to get two judges, two prosecutors, two lawyers and two real forensics for a trial against Hamlet for killing Polonius. "Once he got the first judge, he took it upon himself to talk to other colleagues and acquaintances", he recalls.
The Spanish-Argentine Rodrigo García is the king of unusual requests. Fernando Delgado, production director of the National Drama Center of Madrid, remembers "the famous work of the hamburgers, Golgotha picnic", a particular reinterpretation of the Bible. “The whole floor of the stage was made up of 10,000 hamburger buns, there were a lot of protests saying we couldn't do that, what a waste. Breads that had to be changed from time to time because they went bad and started to stink. In addition, Rodrigo asked us for a certain amount of worms because there was an act where an actor ate a hamburger full of them".
Delgado explains that they have to resort to the Civil Guard for the use of weapons, the firemen for the flames on stage and there are even less clear moments, such as the performance of the Bulgarian Ivo Dimchev in which "it he drew blood during the function”. "We are very strict in the prevention of occupational risks. He does not imagine what the protocol was for those who clean up those blood remains, who rejects the syringes and needles, how they are rejected. We had to reject them as biological remains in the typical jars they have in hospitals. No one in our team, only the company, cleaned the remains of blood that were on the set because of the risks". "Later, in an Aitana Cordero show, there was a moment when an actor ejaculated on a piece of wood. The cleaning was quite an adventure."
Salvador Sunyer, director of the Temporada Alta festival in Girona, especially remembers getting a paralytic dog that knew how to go in a wheelchair for a work by Liddell and the 3,000 live butterflies for a show by Jan Fabre, Preparatio mortis, along with thousands of fresh flowers "Also, you had to feed the butterflies", he says, and mentions that "we also had to do, for a company, a casting of Mexican chickens. Production found three different kinds and the company selected one, the rest we had to distribute among friends, customers, farmers". Finally, he talks about a 70-kilo dog chosen to “meow” as it walked patiently through the audience at a show by Castellucci, Ethica. natura e origine della mente, with a recording in which a cat sounded.
At the Teatro Real in Madrid, there is no doubt that the great protagonist of the unusual requests, even if only for size, has also been Castellucci, with the great Charolais bull of 1,500 kilos Easy Rider, indisputable protagonist of the opera Moisés y Aarón . "We played with an advantage because it was a co-production and they had already represented it in Paris", explain Nuria Moreno and Ana Ramírez, from the Real's Production Department, with Ana Isurmendi, from Regidoria. "They had trained him and he had done very well, there. The problem was where to store it in Madrid so that it arrived without stress at the time of the function. We thought of the Plaza de Las Ventas, of course, but there were only the bulls that went there for the afternoon. Then we contacted a company that breeds and trains animals for shows and movies, and they said yes, but it was an hour away by truck. In rush hour In the end, we found a wonderful possibility: the stables of the Royal Palace. It took two minutes to get to the theater and I was there like a king. They washed him every day so that his golden hair shone, he was a real golden calf. He came from an animal rental company and retired here, it was his last duties", they explain.
But there was an unexpected problem. "The first stage rehearsal was terrible. No one entered behind him. And, the bull, if he felt like urinating, he urinated. And if he felt like defecating, he defecated. He left the presents there. And the dancing actors had to roll on the floor. The first day the boys went out: 'Don't touch me!' And we put Tere, from our cleaning staff, and another girl in there. They were going after the Easy Rider with the bucket, both in black".
"Despite the fact that the challenge of that production - they remember - was the pool, where the performers dressed in white entered with those water-soluble suits and left in black, we had two divers below. The boys had to enter, hold their breath, between submerging and exiting they had to spend 30 seconds. They came in dressed in white, the divers took their clothes off and left as if nothing had happened."
And they note that in the first season almost three decades ago they already had German shepherds on stage in a production by Pina Bausch, Nelken (Carnations). "They were the first animals we had to look for. They were trained, but in that way. But they did it phenomenally. Now in Madrid you can find everything, among other things because it has also become a cinema scene and there are more companies, such as Fauna y acción, but at the beginning it was an absolute challenge".
"Today there are no more challenges. It's as hard to get a Great White Dane to be still on stage as it is to get the next artist to be happy. Where do I buy from, where do I go, change this for me, I'm not ready, I don't feel well, it's just that I don't like it, look for a doctor, it's just that I don't know where there is a pharmacy... All. They call us. And it's all a challenge. Also, opera singers are people who spend a lot of time alone. Once, one told me he hadn't been to his house in eight months. They come and tell you all kinds of things, they let off steam and many times we take them with us. 'Are you coming?'. Very few say no", they say.
