The funny and silvery apples with antiface that Joan Brossa designed for the Max awards, the great awards for the performing arts in Spain, already have an owner in their 2023 edition. And there are many of them because at the gala held last night at the Gran Teatre Falla in Cadiz they were more distributed than ever: no play has more than two. In a night in which Tricicle made the audience stand up and laugh when he collected his honorary Max. The main award of the SGAE Foundation awards, the best theatrical show of the year, went to a piece premiered at the Naves Matadero in Madrid: La voluntad de creer, by Pablo Messiez. A work that investigates the possibility of faith based on Dreyer Ordet’s legendary film, with a final miracle included. At Messiez’s proposal, the youngest of a family of Basque brothers believes that he is Jesus of Nazareth. His sisters think he’s gone crazy for reading Kierkegaard.
In an elegant gala with personality in which there was humor – including that of the puppets of La Tia Norica –, singers, dancers, and in which Judeline sang La leyenda del tiempo to say goodbye to the dead of the year like Carlos Saura or Agustà Villaronga, Tricicle swept away when he collected his prize, which, they said, is not in the race but, said Paco Mir, “we take it as a prize in the middle of the race, we are in the middle of the marathon. Although we have been traveling the roads for 40 years and have seen the transition from the Middle Ages to the 21st century, we still have the illusion of those who are just starting out.” Carles Sans said that “humour is wonderful, I would like every country to have a ministry of humour, which would guarantee its citizens a moment of genuine laughter, life would be much better”. And Mir said goodbye saying that we are invited to the Max in 2080, in which they will give us the prize for the whole race, this time posthumously”.
They weren’t the only great Catalan award winners. La gata perduda, a production of the Gran Teatre del Liceu with the residents of Raval, won in the category of best musical or lyrical show. A montage that explains the struggle of a neighborhood that rebels against the actual powers. The director of the Liceu, Valentà Oviedo, collected the award and recalled that it is a “show that speaks of the Raval from optimism” and dedicated it to its diversity and to the more than a thousand people from the neighborhood who built the work “Opera theaters are capable of unstitching themselves, reinventing themselves and being useful to society”, pointed out Oviedo.
In the theatrical categories, the best direction of the year went to Iñaki Rikarte for Supernormales, a play that breaks with humor the usual patterns about the sexual desire of people with functional diversity, a piece produced by the National Drama Center of Madrid As for the best theatrical performers, the Max went to Pere Arquillué for L’adversari, adaptation of Emmanuel Carrère’s novel about the man who murdered his entire family when he was about to discover that his whole life was a big lie, and ex aequo Marta Nieto and Marina Salas for giving life to La infamia, about the kidnapping of the Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho to denounce a network of sexual exploitation. The best theatrical authorship was that of Jesús Muñoz and Pau Pons for Total Eclipsi, from the Valencian company Pont Flotant, a text about the certainty of death and how it affects our lives. In the categories of best play and breakthrough author, it won Cucaracha con paisaje de fondo, a black comedy by Javier Ballesteros for the company Mujer en Obras that addresses motherhood today. Alessio Meloni won the Max for his work on Valle-Inclán’s La cabeza del dragón. The best production work was for Tanttaka Teatroa for Sexpiertos: about the sexual reality of a person with cerebral palsy, starring Telmo Irureta, who won the Goya prize for breakthrough actor for La consecración de la primavera.
In dance, the winning assembly was La reina del metal, by the dancer Vanesa Aibar and the musician Enric Monfort, while the best choreography and the best dance performer had the same name: Lali Ayguadé for Runa, which enters in the past of human relations with cathartic mood. The best male dance performer was Mario Bermúdez Gil, who defeated Israel Galván with El bosque. Laura Clos won the Max for best lighting for Rojos, from the Miquel Barcelona dance company. Pascal Gaigne’s music for Eta orain zer? was also awarded. (And now what?), by Kukai Dantza.
The prize for the best family show went to La Blancanievas en verse by the Salamanca company La Chana Teatro, while in the street theater category it won Love, love, love by Animasur, a journey on stilts through the love The audience Max was for El petit princep by Àngel Llà cer and Manu Guix, and the social one was for the clowns of Payasospital.
