The stage is the place where you will pay tribute. For a second there seems to be no fiction, as if the actress were playing at being Patti Smith but he decided to use the real theater scene without demarcating its limits. but after Ivana Zacharski begins to be inhabited by the punk poet effortlessly, as if what the actress was seeking was to get to know her and unravel something of her state and her euphoria to turn it into a theatrical scene.
Patricio Abadi uses some of Smith’s texts in his biography called we were children (Lumen 2010) and stops in the first episodes, when she begins her bond with the photographer and visual artist Robert Mapplethorpethe fire in the boarding house where they lived in New York while they were almost homeless young artists and their move to the Chelsea Hotel in the 60s.
Everything iconic about the character, the pregnancy of his writings, his performative imprint, is translated to the stage without fanfare. Mapplethorpe’s photographs are projected while the actress remains alone in that melancholic light of Ricardo Sica which gives it a delicate shine. The images serve as a partner and their songs, combined with themes of Lou Reed and the Stones, seek to recall a poetic recitation, that performative form that characterizes Patti Smith. Abadi stops at the stage prior to her development as a singer, when she wrote influenced by the cursed poets and had not yet recorded her first album.
The biographical component is based on a kind of synthesis, in a fragment that does not pretend to cover an entire life. Ivana Zacharski It has something of that fervor as if what it wanted to recapture on the scene was that vertigo of the avant-garde, that state of creation that could lead Patti and Bob to spend sleepless nights, not feed themselves, or not care about living in the open air of boarding houses. stinking with little money in their pockets because they believed that their art could promise them all the conquests.
The piece is a simple, genuine exercise, sustained in the performance where Ivana Zacharski she invokes that poetic force without trying to imitate it, as if entering into a dialogue with the artist. There is nothing forced in this game where the photos seem to radiate an emotion in the actress as if she were entering a trance state, as if everything were a poetic moment where the essence of that life is condensed in that friendship with Bob. The narration of Mapplethorpe’s self-destructive process, of the death of an illness that triggered his condition as a carrier of AIDS, refers to a pact, to an artistic complicity that is not limited to the time in which they were lovers but becomes a companionship, in a friendship that spans the poet’s entire life. There begins that Rimbaudian epic to which she always returns.
Patti Smith is in this work a support that Patricio Abadi uses to make connections between the Howl of Allen Ginsberg (1955) and the poem Corpses by Néstor Perlongher, written during the military dictatorship on a trip between Buenos Aires and São Paulo as if he left character and the author entered the scene. And it is, perhaps at that moment, when the text challenges temporalities and goes beyond the portrait of the protagonist, where this invocation of Patti Smith allows us to think about the fashions of performance, its repeated way of turning to that format and articulate it, in a conflictive way with that gesture that Patti Smith resorted to when she had nothing but her words and her body. A poetics of the moment, of presence, of that moment where a young artist wants to sing her desire to the world.
Patti Smith It is presented on Saturdays at 10:30 p.m. The eccentric of 18.
