In 1962, the film The Miracle of Ana Sullivan became popular, named after the teacher who sets out to educate a deaf and blind girl who lives isolated from the world. Her name is Helen Keller and her story is true. The girl ends up learning and studying, enters university and graduates from Radcliffe College, the women’s center at Harvard University. She was the first deaf and blind person to complete university studies. She ran 1904.
Today Keller is a heroine who is remembered for her tenacity and her spirit of improvement. But like all of her iconic lives, she also has the chiaroscuro to her. And all of this leads to the play Helen Keller, a muller marabilla?, which the Galician company Chévere presents at the Teatre Lliure de Gràcia, from May 9 to 19.
The chiaroscuros arise when the documentation process is undertaken. Playwright and director Xron puts it this way: “We present the contrast between an official story and the hidden or silenced part of this character. Keller’s fight was for personal independence and, in addition, with very powerful political activism. In 1909 he joined the American Socialist Party, but after two years he abandoned it because he considered that he maintained too lukewarm a position, and joined an anarchist union.
Keller is involved in all the struggles of the time with political and social commitment, she is a suffragette, she defends birth control and the right to abortion, “because she believes that if the economic and social conditions of all people are not improved first, there will be no they will be able to improve those of blind and deaf people,” adds the playwright.
“Keller wrote articles expressing her opinion without restraint and her enemies attacked her and tried to destroy her precisely by arguing that a deaf and blind person could not have a complete vision of the world,” he continues. And not only that: “We have found recent campaigns on Twitter and Tik Tok, from the last ten years, that seek to deny the existence of Helen Keller.”
How did the project start? “It was the actress Chusa Pérez who discovered this character for us. From here on, the entire company learned Spanish sign language and now we can communicate with another minority language, such as Galician.” On stage, along with Chusa Pérez, Patricia de Lorenzo and Ángela Ibáñez, a deaf actress, appear.
Borja Fernández, assistant director, states: “In the piece we try to answer the question in the title. We had several dilemmas to be able to do the work. The subtitles were not enough and we have integrated the image of a person who signs the show. We have also incorporated audio description.”
Xron concludes: “We tried to incorporate all of these elements as a narrative part of the show. We have tried to show in the work, in a succinct way, how blind and deaf people perceive it. During the play there is a game between sign language and oral language. Sometimes one advances the other, to provoke that strangeness.”
Likewise, “there are people who have to sit in the front row, others come with a guide dog, others need a little light in their seat. These are things that make the function complex, but it is a discovery. And at no time did we consider lowering anything.” In the case of Lliure, there are two performances with a tactile preview of the stage, on May 10 and 17. One hundred percent documentary theater.
