Nobody expected it but when art intoxicates you to the point of loving it like life itself, you surrender. In that state of communion, being stingy is not even conceivable. Cayetana Guillén Cuervo (Madrid, 1969), actress, presenter and president of the Academy of Performing Arts, has confessed for the first time the traumatic experience that she lived as a child. She had never revealed it publicly and she has chosen to do so for a very good reason in the documentary Mapa a Pandataria, which premieres this February 1 on the culture and science platform Caixaforum.
“There was always something in me, like that secret that you live with. We were generating Pandataria and I told Chevi [Chevi Muraday, choreographer and, along with her, alma mater of the project] that I had never talked about it with anyone but maybe it was time. “I had a very strong sexual assault when I was six years old.”
It was a Saturday morning when his parents were not at home. This is how she explains it herself: “I wasn’t going to tell it in the documentary but when I heard the statements of my colleagues, I said ‘you have to tell it’. I tell it because I want to be fair to my colleagues, who tell all the shit they have overcome to be who they are. Out of every ten women, nine have suffered sexual assault: it is part of our emotional map.”
Mapa a Pandataria is the ‘making off’ of the theatrical show performed for the first time at the Mérida Classical Theater Festival and which will arrive at the Teatros del Canal in Madrid on February 14. “I don’t want this to have too much prominence either, I am just one more telling my story. The play Pandataria talks about us in that boat into which the stage is transformed and which we have to get on. And it is the boat that saves us but together with the others. We have brought together people who are so different and so equal at the same time… We tell our wounds to serve as an example: you can get up and continue and smile and do what you like in life and reach very high. All the members of this cast have achieved their dream and have overcome their own story. And a community is already beginning to be generated that anyone who has suffered contempt, rejection, bullying, ghosting joins… We have all felt rejection and been pandatarios at some point.”
It is not a fable. Or not at all: Pandataria exists, today under the name Ventotene, and is located in southern Italy. The Rome of the patricians exiled adulteresses there and Mussolini recovered it to remove dissidents from his sight.
Cayetana, in charge of the Spanish Version and Attention programs, works on TVE, canonical performer and proud daughter of two legends of the Spanish scene such as Fernando Guillén and Gemma Cuervo, mixes and flows with urban artists from very different backgrounds: “When we consider Pandataria was about talking about diversity and difference, because it is the only reality. You can’t deny yourself: if you don’t like diversity, you can live all day angry or with your eyes closed, but there is no other way. This is a crusade for love, consensus, dialogue, understanding the reasons of others and contributing something to the world. I love urban music, I love rap. Elio Toffana is the poetry of the neighborhoods, I have become friends with Okuda, I like Felipe Pantone, Piro, Suso33… I like all that and in that diversity I live, I function very well and I love it.”
In this ‘making off’ her mother, Gemma Cuervo, intervenes, making an intimate reflection: even with the hours that she and Fernando Guillén (a beautiful tribute that Cayetana pays to him remembering her last days) dedicated to work, two shows a day, “ “There was never a lack of love at home.” That’s when Cayetana makes her third confession: she still hasn’t completely forgiven herself for repeating that pattern with her son.
“I’m on it. I think that new generations of parents have an obsession with hyper-protecting their children and we don’t do them much good either. My parents were away from home a lot but I have been a happy girl. In my house there was always a lot of love; I don’t know how many hours of love, but what there was was great. Things happen in all families, there are traumas, intensity… Families are the origin of half of literature and drama, but I think that the new generations do a disservice to the identity and strength of our child. Well, now that Leo is a little older, I see that he has his own speech, and I am very happy,” she finishes with a smile.
His resume and his name are the history of our scene but he is clear about his position on the stage or on the other side of the camera. “You move me, you knock me down, you make me naked, I have to do handstands… But I have learned the text,” he says in the documentary. Cayetana obeys the director’s orders without question, whoever it may be: “It’s his project and I have absolute respect for the hierarchies in my work. Even if I’m 21 years old, it would be good! I can tell him ‘I see this like this or that’ but if I decide to embark on something, I must do what they tell me.”
The resurgence of the MeToo movement at the Feroz awards makes it essential to ask him about his own experience. Fortunately, he has not suffered any of that type in his profession: “No, I have not experienced any situation of that type. And I am at a time when I would tell it precisely to help, because it is something referential. But I understand that it has happened and it is intolerable.”
