Voodoo (3318) Blixen
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Authorship, direction and set design: Angélica Liddell
Performers: Nicolas Chevallier, Ian Gualdani, Angelica Liddell, Borja Maria Lopez, among other collaborators
Place and date: Teatre de Salt. High Season (XI/18/2023)
In the beginning is failure. The impossibility of translating the more than five hours of Angélica Liddell’s encyclopedic universe into a critique. An exercise in apnea in the purgatory that she has chosen as her artistic residence. In Voodoo (3318) Blixen is an enclosure dyed successively in Marian blue, nude black and Bergman red. Perfect place to pray to heaven and have the door to hell at hand. Between the attraction to criminal horror and mystical elevation. Where to cultivate the mystery of his anger and the names that sublimate the Diogenes of his abysmal affections. Explicit or suggested figures such as Andrzej Zulawski, Bach, Sade, Hermann Nitsch, Fragonard (mutilated), Karen Blixen, Marguerite Duras, Baudelaire, Herman Melville, Saint Paul, Goethe or Jules Dassin parade. And she herself becomes a verb in Kuxmmannsanta.
The five chapters could perhaps be read as a diptych crowned by the imperative plea of ??a graphomaniac not to lose the painful pleasure of inspiration. The first two scenes –radically discursive– are dominated by hyperbolic lyric at the service of primary emotions. Heartbreak, rage and revenge. Liddell sings by Jacques Brel (Ne me quitte pas) and a queen of the song stands on stage. At any moment she could accompany Rocío Jurado, breaking her guts with Que muera el amor. Never has it been so clearly perceived that Liddell’s art is an elevated regurgitation of the roots. Culture as a panic room for loners and sociopaths.
Then Liddell’s elegy and baroque iconography prevail. Compositions that in this montage are particularly fleeting. The retreating performance. Mere presentations; the finite body increasingly a hindrance. Crying for the dead, always associated with violence, accidents, untimely illness, sometimes echoes a Lorca with absinthe crying for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. Dark chronicle, cataclysm of corpses, among birds slaughtered in ancestral rites. An elegy also for the old age that occurs when the death of parents is a fait accompli. Liddell adds a new degree of darkness to his darkness and without compassion he leads us with his words (what a relentless capacity to generate images!) Between the (literal) darkness and into the hell of the consciousness of finitude. When an entire theater is immersed in the degrading antechamber of death, he sends us off with a dedramatized general rehearsal of his last wishes. More officiant and stage director than protagonist. Elegant, in white, cigarette in hand, she gives a half smile and says goodbye with “joy of living.” I will not repeat here and now an outburst as direct as it is deeply admiring.
