Drawing by Fernando Vicente, cover of La Luna, issue 12 (November 1984).
18.00 - 18.30 - Madrid in Motion: la movida's cultural renewal in post Franco Spain
Transformation is at the heart of the late 1970s and 1980s Spanish urban youth movement that came to be known as la movida.
This presentation will consider the work of visual artists such as Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester, Fernando Vicente and Ouka Lele in order to illustrate how la movida’s emphasis on transformation, process, performance and flux contributed to renew the Spanish cultural landscape of the 1980s.
While the movement emerged within a context of rapid, profound and dramatic social and political change –the end of Francoism and the political transition to democracy within Spain, and the advent of globalisation and postmodernism within the international context-, la movida also celebrated change, with transformation a recurrent theme: from urban re-imaginings that suggested the many cities Madrid could become; to the appropriation of elements of traditional Spanish popular culture, which took on new meanings by virtue of their often ironic re-contextualisation.
Further, an understanding of both the creative process and the self as open-ended processes, as sites of change, permeates much of la movida’s cultural production.
18.30 - 19.00 - Nierka
Illustrated talk by the Mexican visual designer and artistic director, Tupac Martir, on his multidisciplinary production which depicts - through music, video images, dance and singing - the rite of passage of a human being.
Nierka takes place in the imagination of the protagonist: it is a dialogue between his conscious and his subconscious.
He starts by reflecting upon how society has exhausted him by imprisoning him in a spiral of monotony of which he has been unaware. In the second act he confronts the monsters and demons in his unconscious: as they seem to become real, he tries to accept his flaws and the effects of his past actions. The third act deals with the reconciliation of his soul, body and mind. By understanding the challenges and beauties of the world he learns to become at one with the universe and its laws.
Tupac Martir is a visual designer and creative director with a wide-ranging portfolio of projects in the arts and entertainment international scene. He has done production design, visuals and lighting direction for Elton John, Sting & Jon Bon Jovi, Beyoncé, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Vivienne Westwood, Nederland Dans Theatre, the Mexican Telethon and for a production of L'Elisir d'Amore at the Mexican National Opera among others.
Nierka, his multidisciplinary production, premiered in London at the Peacock Theatre in January 2012 and is shortly going on tour.
Metamorphoses of myth and language in contemporary Spanish theatre: A comparison of Lluïsa Cunillé Salgado's Conozca usted el mundo/Get to know the world (2005) and ltziar Pascual Ortiz's Las voces de Penélope/Penelope's Voices (1997).
ltziar Pascual Ortiz and Lluïsa Cunillé Salgado are two eminent Contemporary Spanish playwrights— Pascual achieved widespread critical acclaim during the 1990s, especially for Las voces de Penélope (1997), and has been involved in promoting the works of female writers and theatre practitioners in Madrid, Lluïsa Cunillé born in Catalonia is one of the most prolific playwrights to emerge from Spain in recent years, who writes in both her native Catalan and Spanish (I will be using a Spanish translation).
Most recently she was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura Dramática (2010). Her plays have been championed by one of Catatonia's leading contemporary playwright's, José Sanchis Sinisterra.
In this talk, I will explore how both plays dramatise a poetics of borders, exchange and metamorphosis. Cunillé's poetics is created through an oblique and ambiguous vocabulary, whilst in Las voces de Penélope, Pascual can also be said to explore poetic limits through a reworking the mythological character of Penelope from Homer's The Odyssey.
Pascual's poetics is a process of demythologization whilst, by contrast, Cunillé's Gonozca usted el munda continuously withholds information, and as the play progresses the audience become increasingly conscious of the presence of a complex subtext- a subtext which they are never able to fully comprehend. Cunillé uses an economy of language created through her poetics in order to 'velar' (veil), to withhold information, whilst Pascual uses poetics to 'desvelar' (unveil) to reveal what has previously been submerged.