Laura López Moyano says that she still has a lot to thank Velita, the main character of bizarre that she played in 2003. Not only because a leading man is a leading man, but because that long-suffering antiheroine who was her lot taught her to discover other colors and other acting textures that until then she had not been able to test on stage, although knew well of his years of fanaticism on television. It may be hard to imagine López Moyano – so cut by the scissors of independent theater, so powerful on stage and with that half-Almodovarian excess – as a teenager obsessed with evening novels and their archetypal heroines. But those stories were, for her as for many generations, foundational in her sentimental upbringing. “I was an almost insane fan of novels, but at home they were progressive and they wouldn’t let me see them. So I went to my grandmothers to follow the fictions that I liked. I cried and was happy with the protagonists: I lived everything with great intensity ”, he remembers with laughter. “I particularly remember my infatuation with The strange lady: I was a teenager, I was on vacation in Villa Gesell and I was escaping from the beach in the afternoon to see the novel, I had a kind of extreme fanaticism for Luisa Kuliok ”.
Years passed and Laura discovered rock, cinema and theater. Then she stopped being interested in the soap operas that had kept her awake so much. Until, at 28, she got the opportunity to play Velita, that poor and abused girl with the soul of a diva who, according to her account, made her reconnect with “something of that sensitivity, intense suffering for someone who does not love you and the idea of love at first sight ”. Of course, her Velita was not a very conventional heroine and bizarre Nor did it respond to the genre in strict terms: rather, it was a theatrical novel in ten installments of between two and three hours per episode (which means that, to do the complete work in a row, it would have taken more than a day ), with humor, excessive characters and constant links to Argentine politics. As its director Rafael Spregelburd likes to describe it, bizarre it was “a deranged universe forged in the heat of the 2001 crisis” in which fifty actors from an independent circuit theater more bankrupt than Argentina invented a fictional world to take refuge from a reality that did not have much to give.
And just as a few years before Laura would cut off whatever activity she was doing to go see each new chapter of her favorite novels –and, like her, hundreds of thousands of people modified their agendas to access the daily fiction ritual– the Cultural Center Rojas was the epicenter of a unique phenomenon in 2003: week after week, a long line of spectators waited to enter the Batato Barea room while exchanging impressions of the previous episode and figurines from the album of bizarre, which the production had sent to print with part of the financing granted by the Antorchas Foundation. There are those who still keep their albums as relics.
Now, exactly twenty years after the 2001 crisis, the date on which the events of bizarre, Spregelburd decided to bring that world back, with a podcast sequel. The ten episodes that some privileged people saw at the time (and which at this point acquired a mythical character), a few days ago has been followed by an eleventh sound chapter called Bizarre: The Eleven, an Argentine sequel, which was produced by the CCK and can be heard on the Centro Cultural website and on Spotify.
Premiered in the context of an Argentina that, like then, is not exactly partying either, this eleventh episode has, as always, directed by Captain Spregelburd, with musical direction by Nicolás Varchauvsky – key to generating a sound identity that would dialogue this transposition with the ethics and aesthetics of the play – and with fourteen actors from the immense original cast. In addition to Velita, the podcast includes Candela, Velita’s twin sister (Elisa Carricajo), Sebastián Pierri Macao (Javier Drolas), Genoveva (Laura Paredes), Ganga and sister Lucrecia (Valeria Correa), Melody (Lalo Rotavería) and Bizarra (Mónica Raiola) and other actors who in the meantime became fundamental names in the local independent theater.
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For Laura, who has three decades of work on her – and acted in works by Pensotti, Lola Arias, Martín Flores Cárdenas, Veronese, Kartún and a long etcetera – the biggest challenge involved in embarking on this sound version was to count without body: “In the podcast, all the attention is on the text, on the way of saying. You can’t go wrong in one word. Luckily, Rafa, in addition to being an incredible talented man, is obsessive, and he won’t let you pass one. We rehearse many versions of each scene, he was all the time suggesting: ‘Let’s try a sadder version, let’s put a version higher.’ And every time you made a mistake, you had to start over ”.
Far from mitigating the desire for the play to be seen on stage again, Once –divided, in turn, into eleven micro-chapters– feeds the curiosity of those who could not see bizarre at the time and the fanaticism of those who were already fans. Laura, who this year also acted in two works from the Mariana Chaud retrospective at the Sarmiento Theater (The fact Y English pudding), says that all this reunion with the past was the subject of therapy for her, but that if she could choose, she would do it again. bizarre complete, even if that means living again for months for Velita. “bizarre it was, above all, intensity. We did the performances every night, Monday through Friday, and when the performance was over we would rehearse the following week’s episode. I would wake up in the middle of the night to review the lyrics. We sleep re-little for months ”. Who knows, maybe on the next round anniversary of the crisis we will be lucky.
Bizarra: El Once, an Argentine sequel, can be heard through from the Centro Cultural Kirchner website and on Spotify
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