Algunes Qüestions Al Voltant De L’ Escriptura Del Llibret D’una Òpera Comunitària Sobre El Raval

Victoria Szpunberg, Photography by Curro Palacios.

Victoria Szpunberg is the author of the libretto of La gata perduda (The Stray Cat), a community opera which is to be staged at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu in November 2021. In this article she describes what the commission meant to her. In order to write the libretto, which forms the basis of a community creation process, she drew on interviews with women who live in Barcelona’s inner-city Raval district. This work, in turn, will lead to other co-creation projects in the framework of the European project TRACTION.

I have written scripts for dance works, performances, visual and musical works, adaptations, sound installations, plays for children, radio dramas, and other productions. Basically, I write theatre texts, but I have shifted fairly flexibly from one format to another. Every work has its own special traits, its artistic team, its requirements and its particular setting. When I receive a commission, I give careful thought to the premises and then try to link them to my own method of working. Some commissions can turn into enriching personal experiences, while with others it’s not so easy, and still others merely respond to the need to subsist.

This particular commission for the libretto of a community opera about the Raval district came from Valentí Oviedo, the director of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, and blew open most of my conceptual limitations and prejudices. I realized from the start that the challenge would be exciting and difficult in equal measure.

How was I to build bridges in the stigmatized and ungovernable Raval district, a community-based creative experience (involving practices I have not always felt quite comfortable with – I’ll try to explain this later to avoid misunderstanding) and the conventions of opera (a genre second to none in artifice and convention)? And finally, how was I somehow to connect all this with my own way of writing? I spent the first two months pondering over these questions, reading some extraordinary material about the history of the Raval (notably the book by Miquel Fernández, Matar el Chino), strolling about the area and its surroundings, talking to the members of the great artistic and logistic team of the Òpera Prima project, and jotting ideas down haphazardly in a notebook.

Writing, for me, has to do with the quest for personal freedom and our innermost memories. I try as hard as I can to hold on to this experience, this inner movement, this sort of internal, untransferable joy (or pain) which accompanies you during the greater part of the creative process. It is important not to lose this personal impetus, which makes you fly very high and at the same time plunges you into certain lows. This is what leads many of us to opt for this career rather than another. It makes you dizzy, it’s not always healthy, but it’s a way of life. Ultimately, it’s a craft closely connected to emotions. And just as it is important to make your own voice heard, any theatrical project should also be attentive to the pulse of society: you must pay heed to what’s happening outside your own room and stay tuned in to reality.

Camus expressed this very well in a speech he made in 1957:

“[If art] conforms to what the majority of society asks for, it will be ineffectual entertainment. If it blindly rejects society, if artists decide to isolate themselves in their dreams, they will express only rejection. That will give us output from entertainers and formal perfectionists and in either case the result will be art that is cut off from living reality.”

The question of “living reality” is one of the great shortfalls of the performing arts, especially opera. It has to do with broadening our perspective, letting ourselves be imbued by what’s going on in the world (including the nearby world, not merely the world communications and social media talk about) and, in this case, it has to do with watching and listening to the residents of a neighbourhood and their lives.

We held numerous meetings and interviews and encountered such a wide array of unusual and splendid people that you could devote a work to any of their stories. Every meeting, I would say, conjured up a variety of scenes in my head. All inspired and stimulated me greatly, but there is one person who inspired the whole libretto in a very special way.  His name is Iñaki Garcia and he is the director of the Lokal del Raval (1).

His political gaze ­– critical, humble, full of experience, sensitivity and proximity ­– reminded me from the start of an idea Didi Huberman develops in his book Survivance des lucioles, when he draws a contrast between the light of fireflies and that of great reflectors. Huberman tells us about the political despair that Pasolini overcame in 1975 when he wrote his text about the disappearance of fireflies (lucciole) and asserted, in an entirely pessimistic historical vision, that it was a mistake to believe that the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s had been overcome.

In a letter to a friend written in 1941, Pasolini talked about the surviving radiance of the counterpowers. By 1975, however, when Italy was a democracy, he was prophesising unswerving adhesion to the models imposed by the capitalist system. But Didi Huberman tries to lay out a path, to point to a possibility which will prevent us from succumbing to total nihilism. He encourages us to look for a flickering, feeble light:

“we must open our eyes in the middle of the night, move about untiringly, and start looking for fireflies,”

he says. And further on he continues:

 “It is one thing to draw attention to the totalitarian machine and quite another to rush to acknowledge its definitive, undisputed victory… That amounts to seeing nothing but the black night or the blinding light of the reflectors… It means seeing nothing but the whole. And thus, failing to see the space – albeit the interstitial, intermittent, shifting, improbably located space ­– of the gaps, the possibilities, the gleams, the ‘even so’… It’s a matter of crucial importance. And so, there can be no dogmatic, radical or overall response to it. There can only be signals, singularities, fleeting and even faint glows… Fireflies… “.

And later he asks himself:

“What part of reality – the opposite of entirety – can the image of a firefly refer to today?”

I have obsessed over this question for years. I often talk about the personal and collective need to find the nooks and crannies where singularity, humanity, criticism or beauty dwell. My encounter with Iñaki was decisive, I felt he was a concrete example of what Huberman was asking for. I was able to visualize a precise image of a dot of light.  In the work he does in the district – far from institutional recognition, the cultural showcase and great, sermonizing slogans –, he is a permanent contact with the most fragile residents and associations. Always attentive to all their activities, struggles and celebrations.

The reception he gave us – as affectionate as it was irreverent, strong in its precariousness, genuine and lucid despite the disorder – provided me with a leading thread. Not only did our encounter inspire the spirit of the libretto (sparking off a search for political content and an unclassifiable, free style), but it contributed precise rejoinders (“there’s what you can see and what you can’t see”) and specific images which are part of the work.

Before concluding, I would like to return to my earlier comment about the task of community art. I said this type of social art or community creation project has often made me somewhat uncomfortable, especially when put to excessively institutionalized or commercial purposes. I don’t want to generalize, just to warn of the danger of taking artistic processes, which often transit through the most “ungovernable” places, from those that defy classification or assessment, and try to classify them and make them part of a trend. Not long ago I read a tweet I liked. I won’t name the author, just transcribe part of the contents:

-Hi, cultural managers: Asking artists to make projects that “communicate” messages with a “social” content is the same as asking doctors to hand out holy pictures in their consulting rooms. It’s not art, it’s propaganda. It’s not synergy, it’s extorsion-

My thanks to the team at the Liceu for allowing me to wish, make mistakes, contradict myself, argue and dream while this process was underway, for not imposing any paternalistic, politically correct or overly conventional view. Teamwork makes sense when your own voice is not muffled, and art is not instrumentalized.

And to finish, I would like to return to Camus:

“Vulnerable yet obstinate, unjust and passionately committed to justice, [the writer] builds his work without shame or pride, in full public view, always torn between pain and beauty, and dedicated ultimately to extracting from his twofold existence the creations he stubbornly tries to erect in the midst of the destructive movement of history. Who, in these circumstances, could expect him to produce ready-made solutions and lofty moralities? Art consents to reality and at the same time denies, questions and challenges it.”

(1) El Lokal defines itself as a “libertarian space in the Raval”. It has been in operation since 1987:  https://ellokal.org/