It is a challenge to bring the classics to the stage because they are full of prejudices: Faesler

Putting on stage a classic text that perhaps contains prejudices or concepts that are inadmissible today was the challenge that stage director Juliana Faesler faced during the staging of an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare, with incidental music by Mendelssohn.

The performance is part of the third 2024 season of the Philharmonic Orchestra of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Ofunam), which explores the relationship between music and literature.

One of Faesler’s interests throughout his career has been aesthetics-ethics.

He explains: “We’ve worked a lot on how everything we say in these classic works can suddenly be very patriarchal, preachy and misogynistic. It is very difficult to work on a classic text now because it is full of prejudices. It is about erasing that and generating a text that is still poetic – what Shakespeare says is fantastic – but that we no longer carry the full weight of a time, or of a norm of existence that is now inadmissible.

There are many things in the classics that you simply cannot say on stage.

–Is it difficult to refine classic texts for today’s demands?

–There are tastes for everything; However, for me, it is about rescuing the essence and poetics of the human experience, what Shakespeare does, without having all that tremendous weight of a colonialist writer.

“There is nothing more tremendous than The merchant of Venice u Othello. When you work with the classics they have the difficulty of how to assemble them, because they are of total value; However, as artists we cannot continue normalizing behaviors that are no longer acceptable just because it is a classic.”

Hence the adaptations. For the present 90-minute staging, Faesler focused on the stories more interestingthat of the young lovers and that of Titania and Oberon, the kings of the forest and the force of nature. Were cropped the parts more pompous referring to the monarchy, the emperors and the Greek gods –worlds that today do not tell us much–, for concentrate in human experience. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy of errors, of encounters and disagreements. It seemed to Faesler that the The purest feeling was in the young people who meet and disagree on this night of San Juan, carnival and spring solstice. It seemed to me that everyone in life has experienced love and heartbreak, disagreement and passion..

This version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream It is a 2010 project led by the Theater, Dance and Music directorates of the UNAM, with the intention of making an interdisciplinary proposal. That is to say, work together and form a kind of organism that moved, lived and breathed together, to erase the borders between each discipline in order to be a joint project.

In 2014, this staging was presented at the Cervantino International Festival. Now the project is resumed with some updates and with Ofunam, directed by Sylvain Gasançon. For Faesler, the participants are very electric; that is to say, Everyone is aware of what happens in the music, in the body, in the sound and in the voice. It is very emotional, because it is like a celebration of being, of unity, of working together, which we need so much..

There will be about 140 people on stage, including musicians, actors and members of the choir, this one directed by Rodrigo Cadet. The costume is contemporary. The staging is conceived as a tribute to the movie orchestra rehearsal (1979), by Federico Fellini, in which the characters intermingle.

Regarding the adaptation of the text to music, it was a fine embroidery work. We were very careful to see where we put this thing or that respite. It was a puzzle job.. Faesler found it a project exciting and fun.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream It is presented today and tomorrow in the Nezahualcóyotl room, of the University Cultural Center.