Lluis Pasqual rereads the Andalusian poet’s masterpiece by accentuating its poetic aspect and abandoning all naturalism. The director conceives the show as a contamination of prose, dance and song, relying on Lina Sastri’s eclectic skills. The work is presented as a real flamenco session, with the chairs arranged in a circle and all the actors present for the entire duration. Three musicians accompany words, songs and dances.
Blood Wedding is nothing but a “chronicle of a life event” told by a poet. Just as, sixty years later, Koltès would be struck by the mug shot of a delinquent, allowing himself to be inspired for that masterpiece of great poetry that is Roberto Zucco, in the same way Lorca was thunderstruck by a news event that took place in 1934. A few miles from Granada, in barren countryside, during a wedding party, the bride elopes with a distant relative. The betrayed groom chases them with a group of cronies, and the affair ends in a knife fight. In the poet’s mind, this news story became a cry against any “convention,” a cry for freedom and a hymn to passion.
“I think representing the text as Lorca wrote it would not do justice to the poet,” Pasqual explains, “We are no longer the spectators of the 1930s. We have to go to the root of the story and look for the deep place from where this pain emerges. In his words, “in the dark root of the scream.” In Blood Wedding there is a lot of music, also written by Lorca, who was a great musician. Music that has its own particular geometry derived from cante jondo, which means dark and deep singing and is a haunting variant of flamenco. This music flows like a karst river in Lorca’s text, you have to make it heard, because it was what filled his body, his hand, his ear in an arid land surrounded by the sea, in the south of our so-called civilization, in Andalusia or in Sicily, there is no big difference.”