Núria Vizcarro is one half of the duo that makes up La Ravalera Teatre, a young company from Castelló that stood out with its third work, Instructions not to be afraid if La Pastora comes. The piece made a stratospheric journey from Cabanyal Intim de 2018 as premise MAX 2019, where he was a finalist in the categories of Best New Show and Best New Author. A small company was on the verge of winning the state's most important performing arts award, from a small town, speaking of a town of thirty inhabitants. But before the MAX gala in Valladolid, Vizcarro was already working on another new scale dream at the Main Theater of Castelló, a large public production supported by the Valencian Institute of Culture (IVC) which traveled to the Sagunto a Escena in the summer and is now integrated into the regular programming of the Rialto Theater in Valencia.
Your theater is closely linked to the oral culture and myths of Castelló. In Instructions not to be afraid if La Pastora comes townspeople appear talking about the legend of La Pastora and to assemble the work dream you will document yourself by asking the grandparents from Castellon about stories and curious characters from the area. What you will discover during this process?
I documented myself, aside from asking everyone he found, especially from authors such as Josep Pascual and Tirado with From my garbera or Antoni Porcar with The roots of a hawthorn and I was looking for those anecdotes, those stories that could give me some special characteristics for the characters, some specific event that could be transferred to a magical night… For me one of the discoveries was to understand that identity, what roots us in our environment, can be found in a way of speaking. There is a whole series of words, of vocabulary that draws a time and a way of understanding the world, in our case it is very related to the field, with the garden and the marsh, and the fact that the people who understood life from that vision have disappeared also means that this world is disappearing. In the authors I quote you, this vocabulary and this sound are very present and I really enjoyed the idea of looking for the words that added identity to each group of characters, find a completely understandable language but with a certain poetic aftertaste, I would dare to say in some cases mythical, which is directly related to the world to which they belong and which are close to us and ours.
To fulfill the IVC's task, you will look for a classic text to adapt. Why Shakespeare? Why A summer night's dream?
The project was born from the revision of a classic to be able to explain our environment and The Dream it presented itself to us as a good opportunity to draw and invent, as I did Shakespeare, a mythology or legends closely linked to the space in which they pass. The Dream it gave us that scope to be able to create the closest atmospheres and worlds and at the same time talk about such a universal subject as love or, better said, the freedom to love and daring, the courage to love.
Shakespeare's classic A summer night's dream talks about a magical night in which a crack opens through which magical beings who live with real beings come, in the case of dream, linked to Castelló (although it is never pronounced "Castelló".). What kind of magical beings will we see? Those of us who are not from Castellón will understand the references that appear?
I started working and researching the legends of Castellon, the magical beings that could live there and I found the water women, magical women who appear on Midsummer's Eve, very tied to aquatic spaces and that often live trapped by love. From these beings we thought of water and the sea, as gent de mar, but also earth and mud, of the marsh. With these ingredients and throughout the work we have been developing the idea of magic in order to eventually head more directly towards the ancestral, the most earthly part of magic, those characters you can often find in passing places, that are not from anywhere but have always been, that they can guess a storm and you never know where they sleep.
Regarding the Castellon references, we precisely wanted our story to take place in a certain place, the conflicts and what he talks about can be transferred to everyone's home. That is why we thought that the historical context in which we wanted to place the work was important. And we found a time of change brought about by the industrialization that Castelló suffered during the sixties and all the citizen mobilization that cried out against the factories and others that were installed in the degree of Castelló by the sea. The work refers to and transcends the idea of this context and is an easily identifiable era for many cities, the moment when you go from being a big town to a small town, the changes this entails, the abandonment of the countryside and traditions, the need to go to work in factories…
dream transfer Shakespeare's classic to Castellón in the mid-20th century and to complete the piece you have had the help of the Mexican Juan Carrillo, author of the work Mendoza which sets Macbeth in the revolutionary Mexico of 1910 and we will be able to see in the Festival Third Week of 2017. You have brought someone from the other side of the Atlantic to direct a very local theater. It has been complicated? In what way has Carrillo enriched the work?
The project is born, precisely, of the test, of the challenge posed by this meeting and this exchange and take the opportunity to thank the IVC for the courage it entails to feed this type of project from the public theater, where research and dialogue between creators is one of the main objectives. It hasn't been easy, we must not deceive ourselves, during preparation, before rehearsals, the time difference between us complicated things a little and many times we had the feeling that it was necessary for him to come, to see our world, the degree, the marsh he was talking about so he could understand what he was saying. But the fact that it was not easy does not mean that it was not profitable and once here, the work was very intensive and made easier. I think that bringing someone who sees for the first time everything that you've grown up with gives a new perspective to what we're dealing with and in a way gives it that universality that we look for when we go to the most local.
Last, we are talking about women playwrights from Castelló, because you come very strong. You shared a MAX nomination for Best New Author with another from Castellon, of Height, Mafalda Bellido. How do you see the theater scene in Castelló?? Who do we have to track down??
I see the theatrical panorama in Castelló with great hope. I have lived abroad for a few years, like many people who left to study, me first in Valencia and then in Barcelona, Mallorca… and I came back a few years ago. When we started with La Ravalera, it will be five years, there were people who told us that Castelló was very strange, that nothing ever worked here. We sold out all the tickets from the first edition of the Fair that we did and not only because what we were doing was good (that too!!) but because I think people wanted to see things, but they had to be offered. In recent years in Castelló I have been able to see works that I would only have seen if I had lived in Madrid or Barcelona and also other proposals that can only exist because they are born in a very small place. All activity, every proposal adds up and creates a culture broth that over time bears fruit, it's no coincidence that it's now that our names start ringing, we are not people who have just arrived, but it is now when we are seen or made visible, when we were able to work with a certain dignity and evolve with what we do.
Follow us everyone, take advantage of that company that has come to Valencia from Castelló or from any other place and that no one knows, let this be the incentive to go to the theater and not, precisely, what makes you stay at home. Find out what people who work from outside the big cities are saying, because they have a lot to say!
