You have to be sublime without interruption. The maxim that guided Baudelaire throughout his sad and unhappy life can serve as a perfect summary, which was indicated in the subsequent colloquium, of Miguel Ángel Gallardo’s performance in the Spanish capital. It happened last Saturday the 21st before the countrymen of the diaspora grouped in the Albacete Cultural Association in Madrid with the solo performance by the multifaceted and veteran man of the Maldita bohemia scene, which is more, much more than a play, much more than the so fashionable monologues, much more than a cataract of declamation of verses. The spectacle so penetrated and shook the heartstrings of the public that the final applause with the people on their feet lasted for five long and uninterrupted minutes.
To the point that the protagonist of the session, overwhelmed and moved by the resounding applause, asked them to shut up once and for all, a request in which the president of the group, Patricio Morcillo, helped him, although clarifying that it was going to be difficult: «Because we are still flattened with this lesson, this rain of dramatic art that you have sent us from the stage». A downpour that forced Gallardo to hold an initially unforeseen conversation with the attendees, giving answers to multiple questions, all of them laudatory with respect to this exhibition. Because, as the man from Albacete commented at the beginning, when he presented and explained what this cursed Bohemia was about, “this tribute to so many unsuccessful authors despite the literary quality of many of them in an era whose greatest emergence occurred in the second decade of the Last century”. As he added, their idea was to break the dogmatism of that unjust society that did not even allow any of “these characters drowned in the stream of their continuous failures to climb to the top of Parnassus.”
Then he added that the structure of what was going to be seen was a review scripted by him with texts by Emilio Carrere, Rafael Cansinos Assens, Juan Manuel de Prada and others, mixed with contributions of his own in the same style. On these writings he was giving life to real characters and other invented ones that were a perfect image of that time and of the suffering of these bohemian and cursed people at the same time. In which there was no lack of presence of some who were saved from extreme poverty, such as the immortal Valle Inclán, who reflected them perfectly through his Max Estrella in the wonderful work Luces de bohemia.
Throughout the development of the work, for an hour, the lesson was including not only a course of perfect interpretation of each of these men and women, all so equal in the background but so different in form. Not only that acting gift, but there was no lack of body movements, mime, voice imposition and another series of virtues that went beyond Talía’s art. As he stated in the colloquium to the question of one of the many theater professionals who were Gallardo’s companions in his five decades of dedication. «There have been hours and hours of rehearsal in my house in the neighborhood of Carretas».
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