Angélica Liddell, love to die for

Angélica Liddell is back… you can already feel it from the first images, a series of curtain rises on a golden yellow arena. Feline painting: the artist keeps a pack of silky cats on a leash. Bullfighting painting: the bullfighter performs her ablutions before the beast appears, a magnificent illusion. It is already a question of love and death, of sperm and blood: torate as one loves, love as one dies. The beginning of “Liebestod” subtitled “The smell of blood does not leave my eyes” is like a summary of the art of Spanish: mystical, enigmatic, beautiful and violent.

Created in Avignon in 2021, re-proposed for nine days in Paris, at the Odéon, this show Blow of the sword / blow of the horn participates in the “History (s) of the theater” project initiated by the Swiss director Milo Rau. The third “Story” is therefore that of Angélica. Exclusively. She is dedicated to it more than ever, raising the level of her art and writing to dizzying levels, crossing paths with the two extreme figures of the mystical bullfighter Juan Belmonte and the titanic composer Richard Wagner. For two hours he is alternately the torera and the bull, Tristan and Yseult, the devil and the good Lord. He summons demons and angels through cheeky chants of variety (“Asingara” from Las Grecas), large church organs and the song of love and the death of “Tristan”.

“Liebestod” is an artistic manifesto in the form of immolation. Angélica Liddell rejects the lukewarmness, decorum, conventions and polite codes of our time. With an explosive, tight, relentless writing, she first casts a spell on herself, theater and art through a two-stage poetic expression. She is the first Angelica to kill herself. In a dialogue with herself, the Spaniard describes herself as a woman who is eternally sick of love who transcends her neuroses on stage, who only knows how to talk about herself, scream, show off and mutilate herself – an incessantly repeated litany that, in the long term, he says, can only tire audiences.

The absence of God

Then the artist attacks the world, France, its squeamish democracy, its soft, “eco-responsible” teenagers, who at sixteen march for their pension rights, their social compromises, their strikes, their secular teaching … The theater, actors and especially actresses who are so ready to sell themselves to advertising, scoff at its audience, expresses its hatred of the bourgeoisie “women and homosexuals”, brings heterosexual love to the pinnacle. Radical feminists, activists of the “fluid kind” cling to their posts … At the end of her monologue, she calls for the establishment of a “theocracy”, desperate for the absence of God and its corollary, the death of the poet.

Reactionist and / or provocative? Its incandescent and cathartic verb ignites the stage. He intoxicates us with his violent and desperate tenderness. His speech is theater. Angélica Liddell is a theater. And for her the theater is a church. The last scenes are breathtaking rituals that are increasingly beautiful and more provocative. The Spaniard talks with her dead bull, like Isolde with Tristan, she caresses a mutilated man, brought on stage as Christ taken down from the cross.

Then, in a last pirouette, the bullfighter, widow of her bull, expresses the desire to leave. “Killing lions in Africa”, before sketching out some dance moves with an African prince or god entering the arena. “Liebestod”, a poem of love and death, ends in a dance of joy, on another continent.