The historical framework where the festival is held is the festivities of Santa Eulalia, a figure where the protagonist of this project resides.
Legend
According to Christian tradition, Eulalia was a girl from the Plan de Barcelona, more specifically, from the Desert de Sarrià, at the end of the 3rd century. Educated in Christianity, still a child, at the age of thirteen and during the persecution against the Christians carried out by the prefect Deciano, she did not want to renounce her faith and was condemned to suffer different torments, until, when the judges saw that they did not serve to make her renounce Christianity, they condemned her to die on the cross in the form of a crossbeam.
According to tradition, the girl suffered thirteen torments, as many as she was years old. She was whipped, her flesh was torn with hooks, her feet were put on red-hot coals, her breasts were cut off, her sores were rubbed with pumice, boiling oil was applied to her wounds, she was doused with molten lead and thrown into a raft of lime. In addition, she was put in a barrel full of glass that was rolled around, burned at the stake, flea-ridden because she was bitten, and finally crucified.
Concept
We make attractive that which is not attractive, we mask the torture but we do not make it disappear.
Resistance speaks in a poetic and theatrical way of the thirteen martyrdoms of Saint Eulalia. The installation establishes a parallelism between theatre and life, seeking a certain primitivism in the representation and using non-arbitrary theatrical elements.
Resistance in front of martyrdoms and as light material. Thirteen bottles of water and blood hang from a structure of pulleys, ropes and counterweights, theatrical elements that are not hidden from the viewer’s sight, and drip on thirteen resistors resting on a carpet of glass and mirrors.
Fire, water, blood, glass, nails, ropes… Fire that illuminates, heats, burns and evaporates life. Water and blood as life and as an element of torture, drop by drop. And with the sonority of the drops and their evaporation, the sounds of glass, metal and fire, torture makes its way through the corridor.
Credits
Authors: Sergi Cerdan i Carmen Triñanes
Tutoring and coordination: Ignasi Font
Scenography: ESAD (Escola Superior d’Art Dramàtic)
ESAD Management: Mercè Mariné i Anna Estrada
Cap d’Especialitat: Bibiana Puigdefàbregas
Collaborators: Oriol Martín, Irene Ferrer and Damià Duran, Students of the Escola Superior de Tècniques de les Arts de l’Espectacle (ESTAE), Lola Belles, student of Scenography (Institut del Teatre) and the Teatre Lliure.
Institut del Teatre www.institutdelteatre.org
Sponsors: Fluge and Association of Lighting Authors (AAI)
