In 2018, the Colombian actress Juana Acosta (Cali, 1976) was promoting a triumph, the movie perfect strangers, which was shot under the orders of Álex de la Iglesia. He then offered an interview to the Colombian newspaper Time, in which the journalist wanted to investigate an event from her past: the unsolved murder of her father, in the very violent city of Cali, when she was just 16 years old. Sharply, the interpreter evaded responding that she only spoke about this matter in the private sphere. However, tonight, on the stage of the Teatro Bellas Artes de Madrid, she will be approaching the traumatic event from the dance, well accompanied by the dancer Chevi Muraday, director of Losdedae, who agreed to choreograph this 30-year-old pain, in The forgiveness.
“I wasn’t ready,” she says. “Until last year, when I decided to call Chevi and the playwright Juan Carlos Rubio to tell them my story. I didn’t want to offer them a play, or a book. I wanted to express it through dance. I danced ballet from the age of three to six, and from there until I was 16 I did contemporary dance ”. He was leaving precisely for his dance class that day when the phone rang and they gave him the tragic news. Then came pain, rage and anger, and with them the dance of his life and his body disappeared. “Fortunately, there was acting and theater, which saved me,” he says.
The montage, which returns her to dance and to a tragic moment that has ruminated in her head for three decades, then has an air of exorcism, catharsis and reconciliation. Pisco-magic as he likes to say. “What we really wanted is to investigate the circle of violence, that violence that generates violence. When you are in this situation there comes a time when you have to decide whether to stay in rage and anger or if you decide to forgive and move on. I opted for the latter, and today I feel personally and professionally fulfilled. Today I can tell my story,” he explains.
His older brother, who was left in a rage, ended up committing suicide after being kidnapped by the FARC in Colombia. And for Juana Acosta all these tragic events also made her hate her country from which, today she admits, she perhaps fled. There, very young, he had triumphed. He starred in the soap opera Masquerade, was a television presenter and was very popular. Madrid was his destiny and starting from scratch again, his goal. “Today the rage disappeared,” she says, convinced. “In 30 years I have gone through all phases of grief. I had the killing energy, I wanted to kill and that scared me. So the first forgiveness is to myself for thinking about it.”
Go ahead
Underlines that The forgiveness it does not want to be the tragic account of the death of his father or brother. Nor was it the intention to wallow in that pain. The title is not accidental. It is a play about the ability to forgive and move on. “It is not sad or pessimistic. It is a work of resilience and hope. Violence appears opposed to beauty and poetry. It is not a psycho-drama or a pamphlet”.
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It also means a return to dance, something that, physically, has not been easy. Three months, five hours a week, as if she were an elite athlete. Thus he put his body in tone to be up to the task. “It is amazing to confirm that the body has memory. They spent many years working on dance, but that information was there. I thought I was unable to resume it, but I am very disciplined, and now I dance and literally fly on stage. It was a great physical demand”.
The cinema is also there. This same month opens They came at night a drama by Imanol Uribe. Pending premiere has The consequences, by Claudia Pinto, and big bad wolf, by Gustavo Hernandez. These are very productive times for Juana Acosta. And while she’s fascinated by these jobs and the opportunities they present, she admits that The forgiveness It is the most daring and courageous of all of his life so far. “It has been a tough process, emotionally complicated, in which I have been exposed, but I have been well accompanied.”
Strange position
Chevi Muraday likes to take actors to the dance. Marta Etura, Ernesto Alterio, who was precisely the couple of Juana Acosta, Aitana Sánchez Gijón, and much more recently the delusional performer Miss Beige, among them. But, although it has been their will and initiative many times, it was always their own projects. That makes the difference with The forgiveness, which was an alien and disconcerting proposal. “His story moved me, but above all his interest in telling it not from violence but from a beautiful and poetic place. At first it was not exactly a conflict, but I did get to wonder what I was painting, what could I contribute, “he explains. But they investigated, spoke with relatives, collected data on the violence in Colombia and little by little they articulated this duet that actually has a single character: Juana Acosta being herself and her circumstances.
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