With the show OMBRA, La Fura dels Baus proposes a new staging about the poet, probing on Federico’s personality as a Man instead of describing his characteristics as an author and universal figure.

To project Lorca’s image is to enter a world of soft presences, of flight, of low voice laments. Everything appearing on the stage has a finite tic of cigar’s ash. The words, images and music melt in a single beam illuminating a memory, a frustration.

OMBRA commences with Federico Garcia Lorca’s life last scene, his murder, the sad episode he was destined to. We propose a lyric autopsy, projecting a sentimental radiography, in the time span between a man’s execution and his clinical death.

We bring to life a set of characters through an imaginary extraction of his body: his intimacy, his pressure, his rupture. These concepts trace out the character representing them. Each one of them is a part of the man that is a poet after crossing the gate of death and being granted the myth status.

Art is long,

Life is short

Sonorous cartilage joins in the dark the poet’s passionate life.

Between the dream-like physics of the primal poem and the traumatic and final poetry of the untimely murder, noise snippets, from intuitive impressions, accumulated ranging from the first jondo singing competition to the prophetic and funny fraternity of jazz, copla, Cuban son and flamenco. How many magic options to deal the cards of Andalusian three by four, the basic and ritual black American rhythm, the bird sounds that Federico as a boy heard in San Vicente, or the deafening horn and sirens the young traveller would hear in New York.

We have a privilege in our hands. We were born with all those literary treasures already written, from where the inspiration and lorquian genius emerges day after day for any one to enjoy.

We are the bastard fruit from our past and Lorca liberates us from the root of our feelings to the top of our reasoning. Thanks to men like him the future has not stopped and the young ones have learnt, through to his work, to relate in an unlikely space, inexistent times so real that can be touched, felt, cried.

We jump from page to page through the poet’s verses to the tragedy of his murder finding in all this a soft scent of jasmine and a drop of blood. And it is in that cruel paradox where the theatre’s crime turns physic for the author and ethereal for the audience.

From an imaginary line

All the play’s narrative evolves from her, Lorca’s historic facts as well as the imaginary characters surrounding him. Starting from a particular situation, she remembers an anecdote and discovers through the reading, aloud, of diverse writings and thoughts a man and an epoch. She is the voice from the outside and today’s vision linking with a past alive.

Through dance he portraits the poet’s figure. The three characters embodying his intimacy, his pressure and his rupture are extracted from him. Once the execution scene finishes, he saunters through the darkness of empty space, confronting at different times and moments his three extractions or definitions.

It portraits a character or definition of Federico, describing the sensibility, innocence, intimate affection and childhood that influenced the poet’s work. It also shows us the captive homosexuality he carried inside.

It portraits a character or definition of Federico García, describing the insecurity of a man pressured by the environment he lived in. It shows continuos rebelliousness against stereotypes and simple topics of an alien and reactionary society.

It portraits a character or definition of Federico García Lorca, reflecting the need to break with a void that slowly tortures him, the moral obligation with himself. The encounter with the truth of his work takes him to a moment of plenitude in his life. A light that sets a new start with a premature ending.

This character saunters through the darkness and his presence is subliminal in some scenes, where the poet’s figure confronts his extracts to open the doors of the world beyond. It also links to the urban and underground world that the poet lived in and that opened his style to surrealism and the avant-garde of the first third of the century.

Hansel Cereza, Miki Espuma, Pep Gatell, Jürgen Müller, Alex Ollé, Carlos Padrissa, Pera Tantiña