“The collaborative world of networks and friendship of the workers at the Majorica pearl factory fascinated me”, explains Francesca Vadell Cubells, who got to know it first hand thanks to her godmother, who worked there. This led her to interview more witnesses and from this research was born Perla, the play that is now coming to El Maldà, where it can be seen from January 24 to February 18.
“I wanted to get away from me and my godmother and with the actresses of the company Les Pinyes we build the stories of many of the grandmothers who worked there at the beginning”, declares Vadell, who to tell this story has Marta Asamar García , Cèlia Castellano Algaba and Noèlia Fajardo Franch.
“The factory was born in Barcelona – continues the playwright – but the Catalan women complained a lot and then they took it to Manacor. As a result of the factory, the face of the town changed. With tourism and the caves of the Dragon, Mallorca began to be exploited”.
The dramaturgy of the text is by Vadell, but the visuals are signed by Les Pinyes, in a work done between the four artists. Perla is “a tribute to the women workers who don’t appear in the history books”, says the company who, in documentary research, have collected objects left by the workers to be used in the show.
They are women who at the age of 14 already went to work in the “las perlas españolas” factory, as Majorica pearls were known in the middle of the 20th century, who “as adults were proud to have been able to give an education to their daughters and his granddaughters”.
“They worked to build their house and ended up building a network of mutual support, of friendship, which we have not inherited, now we are more individualistic, and instead we have inherited a destroyed Mallorca”, declares the playwright, who recognizes who, among all, have paid “tribute to their godmothers, the pearlers, some of whom went to Mallorca to see the work and were moved”, he concludes.
