Gaspar Campuzano, Francisco Sánchez and Enrique Bustos, in 'The battle of the absent' Víctor Iglesias
La Zaranda, one of the most veteran and personal companies on the Spanish scene, briefly passed through the Olite Theater Festival last Saturday to present its new show,
The Battle of the Absent,
a co-production with the Romea Theater in Barcelona that in In the coming months it will be seen in many cities and the next season will land in Barcelona (from September 28 to October 3) and Madrid (February 17 to March 20). As it has been doing since its founding 43 years ago, once again the group filled the stage with a thousand metaphors and poetic images, which on this occasion they use to fight what may be a last battle in which, they say, they face their enemies interiors and with many others that they have encountered since they began their professional career.
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La Zaranda, which was previously defined as the Unstable Theater of Andalusia la Baja and a few years ago changed this name to the Unstable Theater of Nowhere, is paradoxically a stable company that has not given up in its efforts to develop its own way of doing theater. , impregnated with a very personal poetics that not only emanates from the beautiful and dreamlike texts of Eusebio Calonge, the group's head playwright, but also from the way of making its hard core acting, formed by Gaspar Campuzano, Enrique Bustos and Francisco Sánchez.
The latter, known as Paco el de La Zaranda, is also the director of
The Battle of the Absent.
"The battle could be a reckoning over time, against the creator's natural enemies: bureaucracy, commerce, the insensitivity of the time towards your work," says Calonge.
There is the farce, says the playwright: “That laugh at the theater of the deceitful glories of the world.
In fact, there is a preparation for the absence and a compensation for many things that you know are no longer important ”.
Throughout the play, La Zaranda makes a stark review of the different layers of power.
From the worst of power.
And for this, its interpreters are more actors than ever and break the fourth wall challenging the public.
And the portrait they offer of today's society is so cruel that they start out laughing that are almost grimaces of a pain that deep down we all carry inside.
The play also talks about the survivors of a war that nobody remembers and that, nevertheless, those characters insist on remembering. "They do not give up their vain attempt to win a battle against oblivion, magnifying those skirmishes, mere ephemeris that no one is interested in," explains Calonge. A metaphor of life as combat in which the three actors in the group represent the remnants of an army in disarray that are struggling to keep alive the all-out war that they have waged for more than forty years. “Useless combat, which seems to be our cultural essence, the quixotic. Epic for three phonies, satire of all human power, dignity and faith as an act of resistance. Those were always our trenches. Always defeated, never defeated ”, they maintain.
A scene from 'The Battle of the Absent' at the Olite Theater Festival. Victor Iglesias
It is almost unusual to find a stage group in which none of its components have changed for more than four decades. They only bear the absence of Juan Sánchez, who died eight years ago. Calonge and Paco de la Zaranda believe that what has kept them together for so long is a shared rebellion: “A free spirit in the face of many conventions, in the face of much economic submission. And fidelity to a language that was discovered to us. In today's theater it is very rare to find someone with their own language ”. And it is obvious and recognized, especially outside of Spain, that La Zaranda has it. But they are also certain that their theatrical language was only an outline of everything they wanted to say. “Other things move us. Not an aspiring to something, but a stopping, stopping to share in the search for what we think is theater,which is not thinking but doing on stage. Seeking not only what the theater can give us, but what we can give back ”.