Theatre Programme
by Cristina Morales*
What is the true purpose of the few lines that make up a theater programme?
I wonder this as I review the texts that have been used to introduce the fascinating Happy Island by La Ribot and Dançando com a Diferença to contemporary dance lovers from half of Europe. The intentions of the programmes should be twofold: to serve as an introduction to the company and to serve as an introduction to the work. But apparently, given the artificial, presumptuous, and pleonastic psycho-socio-political-cultural references that are usually used in these synopses, I must be very wrong. I would like for it to be carved in stone that Happy Island is a sensual and tough show that I would recommend to friends and enemies, kids and adults, left-wing fascists and right-wing fascists. However, the institutional communication deployed by the theaters that have hosted the piece only invites one to vomit. They shamelessly put the emphasis on the disability (treating it as a natural fact) of the performers on stage, appealing to compassion from before the lights even go out. The ableist tone runs rife from Berlin to Barcelona, from Zurich to Paris, from Madrid to Basel. Navel-gazing, megalomaniac cultural programmers did not even think that the Happy Island dancers would not give a flying fuck about the compassion that no one has asked for of them. In this article, I am going to talk about that flying fuck and that ableist cultural marketing.
‘Happy Island’ La Ribot & Dançando com a Diferença. Photo by Júlio Silva Castro.
Don't pay any fucking attention to Happy Island’s theatre programmes — the play by La Ribot and Dançando com a Diferença that premiered in 2018 at the Festival de la Bâtie, Switzerland, which, in addition to hosting the premiere, also produced the show — as they fall blatantly at the first hurdle: “At the origin of Happy Island is the encounter between La Ribot and the Portuguese inclusive dance company Dançando com a Diferença. On the island of Madeira, where they are based, Henrique Amoedo and his dancers live with their doors open: here, anyone can come whenever they want, the atmosphere is happy and simple." Simple my ass, and happy... well, man, sometimes more so, sometimes less so! But the Swiss really went Amélie-Poulain-level dreamy by saying that they live "with their doors open"; if the doors were left open for the Happy Island performers, they would probably do the best that can be done in such circumstances: get up and leave. Not to mention that disgusting “inclusive dance” label. Or the patronizing “Henrique Amoedo and his dancers”. Even Amoedo himself knows that the dancers belong to themselves and no one else, and, what is even better, he knows very well that when they dance and forget about everything except dancing, they don't even belong to themselves anymore because they are happily (now truly) blazed.
A week after the premiere, they performed at La Casa Encendida, Madrid. Of course, an imperial capital was not going to fall short in its theater programme. After repeating the Swiss teletubbic rhetoric, the venue added: "Five professional dancers with physical and intellectual disabilities let themselves go on stage with total freedom in this ode to imagination, joy and existence in its most varied forms." How revolutionary and egalitarian the inhabitants of this enlightened little house must feel (the house that illuminates the most is the one that burns) for saying that it is possible to have a disability, professionalism, and dance knowledge all at the same time! Come on, kids, the only thing that comes out of your mouth are euphemisms, trendy leftist remarks, and cultural management and you ended up believing (because, in fact, you have created it) that disability is a natural phenomenon, when in reality it is an invention of the State–Market! “Total freedom”, they write, as if it were a matter of selling hair restorers (and, in fact, it is), as if the creators and performers of Happy Island did not suffer from (and provoke) conflicts.
Let us skip a few shows and we make it to the Paris Autumn Festival, where the play was staged in 2019. “A vibrant testimony to life and a pure homage to the joy of dance, the piece offers a celebratory look at the unprecedented beauty of these emancipated bodies whose driving force comes from their indiscipline”. Total prosopopoeic utopia: life, joy, celebration, unprecedented beauty, emancipated bodies! What does the European dance elite mean when they speak of "emancipated bodies" and "indiscipline"? Are they not revealing to us that open secret that assimilates dance with obedience, dance with "captive bodies"? Are they not assuming that the Happy Island dancers, due to them not coming from institutional or institutionalized performing education, lack that dance knowledge (essential for making a name for themselves) called obedience? Are the French not exoticizing the performers of this piece, treating them, in a Robinson Crusoe way, as noble savages?
And now, folx and fellows, kids and brats, the final bang. On April 24 and 25, 2021, Happy Island was performed at the Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona, and the Catalans announced it like this: "(...) a committed and humanist piece that challenges the preconceived ideas about people with physical and mental disabilities. A cry for life from the difference, reinforcing the autonomy and ability to desire of people with disabilities.” Now, then! Go see the show not because it's a gorgeous piece of theater but because that's how you help what the ableist power calls “people with disabilities”, who, of course, are different from you! In you, dear spectator, there is no difference, you are an approved being (careful, you actually may be; in which case: congratulations!)! Don’t go to see a play loaded with sexual tension, happily consummated sex, and desolation when it isn't; don't go to see a play that will make you want to kiss everyone; don't go to that, no, but go to "reinforce the ability to desire” of the performers! Listen up, blooming cultural managers of the flower market: can you really be so insolent as to say that it is the audience that goes to the theater to serve the artists? Can you use up so much commiseration as to highlight that the main value of a show is that preparing it, touring it, staging it, and receiving the audience's gaze (oh, that ever so clean and informed audience's gaze) “reinforces” the dancers? Is it just me or is the programme saying "go to the theater to do some charitable work"? Neither Bárbara Matos, nor Joana Caetano, nor Maria João Pereira, nor Sofia Marote, nor Pedro Alexandre Silva, nor María Ribot need the audience at all! What's more, the audience actually gets in their way, because if the audience weren't in front of them, if the temporary and economic requirements that a show lasts only one hour weren’t there, if contemporary dance productions weren't swimming in misery and could have a cast of twenty performers, if the morality that governs us allowed us to determine ourselves sexually, Happy Island would not be a show that you could see at the Mercat! It would be an orgiastic intellectual adventure in Madeira. It would be an intellectual orgiastic adventure in the misty Atlantic forests that Raquel Freire uses for the film that is shown in Happy Island — landscapes that remind me of Barry Lyndon's English countryside, not so much because of their shape (so different), but rather for the drama they portend.
Dear potential spectator, do not pay attention, please, to the theater programmes that fall into your hands. Do yourself the favor of not becoming intoxicated (any more than you already are) with the verbiage displayed by the centers of cultural power to cover up their own incompetence and snobbery. The programmers, the cultural managers, are nothing more than professional pretenders: their job is to pretend that they are always in control. Happy Island is a clear example of how to make them lose their temper. Yet it also makes them say the nonsense that they keep for themselves, but really think.
*
Cristina Morales (she/her) is the author of the novels Lectura fácil (Easy Reading, 2018), Terroristas modernos (2017), Últimas tardes con Teresa de Jesús (2015) and Los combatientes (2013), as well as the collection of short stories La merienda de las niñas (2008). Easy Reading was awarded with the Premio Nacional de Narrativa 2019, the Premio Herralde de Novela 2018 and the Prize for Contemporary Literature in Translation 2022 for the German translation by Friederike von Criegern. In 2012, she received the Premio INJUVE de Narrativa of the Spanish Government. She was recipient of the scholarship at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome in 2021 and in the same year got voted among the 25 most important authors under 35 by Granta magazine. Cristina Morales studied law and political science with emphasis on international relations. She is a dancer and choreographer with the company Iniciativa Sexual Femenina, producer for the punk band At-Asko and archivist and difusora de mugrelindas of the collective BachiniBachini. Furthermore, she works as a dramaturg for several theatres and companies in Spain.
