In her intimate and intense world, Valeria dialogues with the voices of those who are no longer with us. And she remembers. Directed by Alejandro Giles and starring the Spanish actress Pepa Luna, Valeria and the birdsby José Sanchis Sinisterra, comes to the Teatro de Parque de España (Sarmiento and the river) today at 8:30 p.m. in a single performance. “Sinisterra is an author who spans all Spanish-speaking dramaturgy, I have already staged several of his plays, I love and respect him very much; he is an inspiring person, and his theatre spans memory and human relationships, which is what I am most interested in working on,” Giles comments to Rosario/12.
-What happened to you, internally, during the staging of this play?
-For me it was a very strong job. It is a work that Sinisterra offered me several years ago, after I made Oh, Carmela!. But first I chose to do another one, because this one touched me very closely and I didn’t understand why. Now I had more experience with the Sinisterra work, and I was able to work on it in depth. Although Oh, Carmela! It speaks very literally about memory, this work is already at a very concrete and very pure level about the work of memory, about keeping alive those who are gone, who are part of our life. Valeria is in search of that love, of that man she loves and who she does not resign herself to losing, and she does all a spiritualist work. And I come from spiritualist parents, I have my childhood crossed by that. Logically, because of these things in life, I was educated in a Catholic school and with spiritualist parents (laughter). And that added to an author who is an atheist! A tremendous mix. I am a person of faith, but I believe a lot in the human being, in self-love and in theatre, I believe a lot in faith on stage. So we have a very interesting combination. And it moved me a lot, because, of course, as a child I was embarrassed, especially being in a Catholic system of friends and references, to say that I had spiritualist parents. It was unthinkable. But with time I assimilated it, I grew and opened my mind and my heart, understanding where practices, religions and beliefs come from. As Pirandello says, no one has the right to break the reality on which another person has based or supported his life. You have to respect what each person believes, and the theatre helped me too. And it was wonderful, because all the rituals that I lived as a child, I now put into practice for directing. Added to this was the fact that my parents had passed away when I premiered the play, so it was really very powerful, and it further activated my interest in working on the struggle of memory, against the forgetting of those who are gone.
-There is a detail that I love, the actress Pepa Luna is a musician.
-Working with her was extraordinary. This is a material that all actresses have loved, but I realized that the actress had to be, in addition to being excellent, a musician, to be able to sustain such a profound text on stage for an hour and a half. She had to be someone who had the confidence to be in a world that she could handle. Just like a singer with an orchestra, she speaks and works with the voices, which are recorded by very beloved actors: there are ten characters speaking on stage, with whom she converses, with much grace, humor and a very high level of depth, dedicated to being able to find the man she loves and cannot resist losing.
-Being a one-man show, how did you find the stage setting?
-The interesting thing about directing is that I find myself with material that I don’t know what artistic form I’m going to give it. That’s why it’s important for me to understand the structure of the material, to understand the work. For me, on an ethical scale, in theatre the most important thing is the work, more than the actors, more than the director, and even more than the author. We’re all at the service of telling the story. The author has already written it, so he can’t be more important than the story. We all have to be able to do personal work, to put ourselves in the place of being at the service of the material, of the story. Once that’s there, when you understand what’s happening, what the action is and what the links are, you move on to working on the artistic form. Valeria lives in her apartment and does translations into Esperanto, while she talks about “how visionary my father was, when he told me that Esperanto was going to be the language of the future” (laughter). She lives thanks to these translations, and she does spiritualism sessions for her clients, but also for herself, because she learned it for herself. She lives in that apartment that she rarely leaves and has her own world there, where the spirits speak to her. It is something that touches us all very closely, because we have all suffered for love and we have all needed to be loved.
Valeria and the birds The play features music by Braian Arévalo, direction assistance by Vanina Rivera, and voice-overs by Carlos Romero Franc, Claribel Medina, Fernando Gonet, Marcos Montes, Miguel Jordan, Ana Maria Castel, Emma Rivera, Livian Fernan and Roberto Vallejos. The play is touring nationally and internationally, “it has had performances in Uruguay, it has already had a season in Buenos Aires and it continues throughout the country. We are very pleased and grateful to the Spanish Embassy, the Cultural Council and the Cultural Center in Buenos Aires and Rosario,” the director emphasizes.
