Has taken the title of a ranchera mexican, black Dove, but its inspiration comes from far, from the theatre of Chekhov and his play The seagull, the drama of live caught between two worlds, two realities, two times. So far away, but so close. Black dove, the new theatrical text that prepares Alberto Conejero, the latest National Prize of Dramatic Literature for The geometry of wheat, is a tragicomedy musical about the republican exile in Mexico and, more specifically, about the second generation of these Spanish refugees after the Civil War.
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Conejero will travel soon to Mexico to begin to give a theatrical and poetic this “tragicomedy of the desert”, which also intends to bring to the stage as a director. With seven actors and many mexican folk songs and Spanish songs of the fifties and sixties, black Dove will be her second work as a stage director, after the geometry of The wheat, which continues its successful tour of Spain.
At the age of 41, this playwright and poet, who in February published his second collection of poems, In this house, it is a clear example of the fact that the theater also is read and has become one of the playwrights contemporary most read. A rare privilege at a time, ensures Conejero, in which the reading in general and poetry and the performing arts, in particular, is as a minority.
The data are there. Published by Ediciones Antígona, Theatre 2010-2015 (which encompasses five works), is now in its third edition, and The dark stone, the text that will be catapulted to fame, has eight. “I never thought in this editorial success,” says the famed gentle and bright. “I assume a great responsibility. I try to have a perennial requirement with what I write and I feel a huge satisfaction for all those viewers who go to the theater and then looking for something more in the text to find the difference between the literary material and the stage. I very much care for the dramatic writing”.
Impoverishment of the language
Continues Conejero: “There is an impoverishment of language in general. I feel that we are ripping away the words and our ability of expression which is the same as to snatch away the life, imagination, and critical thinking. I try my language in poetry to give the reader horizons of life and that in the theatre discover an ambition of poetic,” he explains.
even Though his first house was poetry, through which he came to dramatic literature, it is clear that there is a demarcation evident between the two genres. “I don’t know when the poets ceased to be playwrights, and the playwrights ceased to be poets”, evokes Conejero, who surrenders to the poetry of Samuel Beckett, Angelica Liddell, García Lorca, Euripides, Lope de Vega or Valle-Inclán.
“There are mechanisms and different techniques, but do not leave aside the poet when I write theatre or the other way around. Poetry and theatre are the scriptures of synthesis, we don’t have many words to tell. Both genders need to always the power of suggestion and the silence, to the contrary, that the narrative, where logically is the narrative that premium. It is the condition of a double agent of dramatic literature, which betrays in any way to the theater, and at the same time to the literature, the thing that I really love. Is a script that pulls certain orphan because it goes in search of matter, of body, of time and of the present. This unstable condition has on me a great fascination, and it is undeniable that among the best pages that has given the Spanish are the plays of Calderon, Valle-Inclán and Lorca”.
We like to think of the stewardship of creative and imaginative of the readers of theatrical texts. “Each one must generate its own mise en scene, you must imagine those bodies that speak, the dramatic spaces, and sound, and that is very beautiful,” explains the playwright, who also prepares a work for the actress María Barranco and the drama of the zarzuela La tempranica for the next season.
A director who blemish their own words
The arrival to the stage direction of Alberto Conejero arises not only because with the geometry of The wheat had the feeling that it was a story that I had to accompany until the end, that needed it more that other, but because no one called, no producer or theatre is interested in the text. Therefore created together with a group of actors and friends a theatrical company, Theatre of the Cliff, with which to mount his next work, black Dove, which will be his second work as a director. “I’ve learned to write again directing. I have learned to flame me, to remove words and phrases, to remove literature to give more space to the theater. In the geometry of The wheat, during the trials, some of the texts, the more beautiful they were out and didn’t cost me anything to do without them.” Despite his successes in theater and publishing and its recent national award, Alberto Conejero has called a couple of theatres to represent black Dove and, for the moment, the answer has been no.
