The most Mediterranean Max awards, held last night at the Teatro Principal in Maó, the oldest municipal opera arena in Spain, elevated Juan Diego Botto as best actor of the year and his look at Lorca in Una noche sin luna , of which he is author, as the best theater show, although its main competitor in this edition of the great prizes of the Spanish performing arts, the Catalan production Canto jo i la muntanya balla , by La Perla 29, also ended up winning three of the most important awards of the night: the best direction for Joan Arqué and Guillem Albà, the best musical composition for Judit Neddermann and the best scenery for Alfred Casas and Laura Clos. The Badalona dancer Jesús Carmona, from the working-class neighborhood of Llefià, as he wanted to point out, won no less than two Max for best show and dance performer of the year for Baile de bestias. And the Company, by Antonio Banderas, ended up taking the prize for the best musical at a gala in which the complicated situation of the public that the theaters are experiencing led Juan José Solana, president of the SGAE Foundation, organizer of the awards, to recognize that “after the pandemic, theater and dance have not recovered as we expected, there is a certain accommodation to video at home” and to ask “that we get up from those comfortable seats and go back to the theater.”
With a gala full of waves on stage in which the piano of the Menorcan Marco Mezquida shone or the performance of the Mallorcan Samantha Hudson, who sang Mina’s Parole parole in Catalan, Paraules, paraules, dressed as a mixture of drag and blonde Marilyn and reflecting on the mineral virtues of cherimoyas and bananas, the great absentee was the actor and author Juan Diego Botto, who had a shoot, but in his two awards he sent militant words through his sister Nur Levi and the director of Una moonless night, Sergio Peris-Mencheta. He thanked his mother, Cristina Rota, for teaching him that committing to the profession and to life are two sides of the same journey, and dedicated the first prize, for best actor, “to her and to all those who are still waiting in the gutter of this country that justice be done, that their remains can have a dignified burial with their loved ones.”
Peris-Mencheta recalled that Botto wrote this piece because there were echoes today of the world that Lorca lived in with the current rise of the extreme right “that denies the rights of others and wants to expel those who think and feel differently, and appropriate Spanishness to deny it to everyone else.” He also recalled Franco’s coup d’état and that “he drew up an ideological cleansing plan and exterminated thousands of compatriots; Lorca is the most famous missing person in our history, but not the only one”.
Guillem Albà and Joan Arqué went up on stage surprised and amused to collect the Max for best theater directors of the year for Canto jo i la muntanya balla and claimed their status as clowns: “We said with Joan, going up, that we are going to remember this all life. But we are clowns and we will continue to be even if they give us an award for a serious show, ”he added. Another Catalan, Jesús Carmona, won two Max with Dance of the Beasts and prayed that “if a child says I want to dance, support him, applaud him, I was a child like that, I come from Llefià, from a neighborhood of workers, people without possibilities, that a day he said I want to dance, and today I am here”.
Antonio Banderas was also unable to be at the gala due to a shoot in Dublin, but he sent a message to celebrate that Company, produced in the apple of his eye, the Soho Caixabank theater in Malaga, became the best musical of the year: “Reiterate my commitment to the Spanish scene, we want to continue fighting for the performing arts because I also think that they are needed in the times we are living in where it seems that only things that are recorded exist”, he claimed.
The best actress of the year was Mònica López for the production of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya What do we talk about while we don’t talk about all this shit? , by the company La Calòrica, and another Catalan production, Carrer Robadors, which opened the last Grec festival, gave the best adaptation of the year to Julio Manrique, Marc Artigau and Sergi Pompermayer based on the novel by Mathias Enard.
The best dance performer was Lucía Lacarra for In the still of the night. The best street show was Alter , from Kamchàtka, which was seen at the last Fira Tàrrega, while the best family show was Cris, small brave , a vindication of trans childhood.
