It was a more political awards ceremony than usual, with no less than two ministers, Miquel Iceta and the minister spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez at the ceremony and with elections in three weeks planning on the event: the new mayor of Almagro, the popular Francisco Javier Núñez, wanted to emphasize that “culture is freedom, training, progress, it must be taken care of from the public and not directed, that society develops it”, while Minister Rodríguez, former mayoress of neighboring Puertollano and to whom Iceta ceded his position in the award speech, he claimed that no matter what happens on 23-J, there will continue to be a Ministry of Culture, and he assured that in the face of the current cultural wars, “we should impose the concept of cultural peace”.
A peace that came when culture took the floor in the act and the journalist Rosana Torres and the director of the National Theater of Catalonia, Carme Portaceli, made the laudatio of the winner this Thursday with the XXIII Corral de Comedias Award, which like every year opens the Almagro International Classical Theater Festival: the actress Blanca Portillo (Madrid, 1963), winner of the Goya for Maixabel or the Max Award for Performing Arts for El testamento de María.
“It has been wonderful to dream of you, to talk about life, the theater, it has made me a better person. You are wonderful, generous, supportive, and for me that is the ideology,” said Portaceli, who has directed Portillo in Mrs. Dalloway and he is going to direct it in the adaptation of the novel by Almudena Grandes The mother of Frankenstein. “I want to thank you for being who you are in a country that has never had the tradition of making us feel sure of ourselves, much less of ourselves,” concluded Portaceli.
And Rosana Torres recalled Portillo’s teacher, Pepe Estruch, and how after a bad spell of work that led him to collect unemployment and which, he assured, the actress attributed to her boyfriend at the time, she asked Miguel Narros for a role, which he to go, “and he gave him the crazy woman from the fourth row in the Marat-Sade mental hospital.” “And from there, from the fourth row, she shone again, and until now,” she summed up, before recalling the endless versatility of an actress who has even played Hamlet and Segismundo from Life is a dream. “You have to be able to change gender when you feel like it and feel like it,” said Torres.
And Portillo, after receiving the award, said that she was not very good with speeches and that she preferred letters. And she read one that she had written to the Almagro Festival itself, which is now directed by Irene Pardo. A letter that she recalled that in 1986 she had a theatrical technician boyfriend who had to work in the city of La Mancha. “My teacher Pepe Estruch had told me so much about Almagro… Yes, Javier, I’m going with you,” she told her boyfriend, who had to work at the Corral de Comedias. And as she stepped onto the stage of this fabulous space, she felt that centuries of theater had been accumulated.
“I recited a text by Lope de Vega that I had rehearsed. I went up and down the stairs acting for a non-existent audience. And I felt like an actress,” she recalled, something that in theory already was, but here I became aware of it. “That day there was no one in the audience. And I understood that I had to act here to be a real actress. I haven’t done it yet. But here, on this stage, today I feel more of an actress than ever,” she launched.
And he spoke of the importance of words. “The word, always, the word. They are the vehicle that human beings have to express what we think and feel. I would like you to help me express here today how infinitely happy I feel. Blessed and elusive words. Sometimes they flee. Sometimes we waste them, we leave them hollow, empty. Sometimes they steal them from us. No, no, no. Let no one steal our words,” he warned.
And he concluded: “I want to continue learning to use it as it deserves. The word that germinates in the other, that calms and gives strength. That invites you to live and build. The word that does not hurt, that does not attack. The beneficial word that belongs to whom pronounces it and who listens to it. The dissident and fighting word. The word pregnant with ideas and emotions. The fertile word. But nothing, now they don’t come to my call. They flutter inside my brain and I don’t know which one to choose. Alone one settles on the edge of my tongue: thank you”. Culture peace.
