Catalunya invisible: Contemporary Drama in Barcelona

Catalunya invisible: Contemporary Drama In Barcelona Sharon G. Feldman is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Richmond . She has written extensively on contemporary Spanish and CataL·n theatre and has translated several Catakn pUys. She is presently writing a book on the legacy of Barcelona 's independent theatre movement. Cela est bien dit [...] mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. —Voltaire, Candide During the winter of 2000, LluÃ-s Pasqual staged a Catalan version of Anton Chekov's The Cherry Orchard at Barcelona's Teatre Lliure, the historic home of Catalonia's most stable, accomplished, and distinguished repertory theatre company. In Chekov's play, Madame Lyobov Andreyevna Ranyevskaya, an emblem of the fading elegance and dwindling supremacy of the Russian aristocracy, is compelled by her situation of financial despair to sell her estate and cherry orchard to the nouveauriche Lopakhin and then return to Paris on the eve of the Revolution. The orchard that was once admired for its beauty eventually will be destroyed in order to pave the way for a series of homes that will be occupied by the rising working-class. Those who witnessed the premiere of Pasqual's mise en scène oÃ- Lhort deb cirerers on the evening of 17 February 2000 might still recall with emotion the moment in which Anna Lizaran, in the role of Madame Ranyevskaya, stood before a small-scale replica of the Teatre Lliure, which Pasqual had incorporated into the set design, and made a resounding plea in defense of her cherry orchard. It was a powerful metatheatrical moment, one likely to remain engraved in the collective memory of the Barcelona theatre community for several years to come, for as Lizaran, one of the grandes dames of the Catalan stage and a founding member of the Lliure's resident company, embraced Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 6, 2002 270 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies the replica of this eminently symbolic theatrical space, she seemed magically to localize, and even domesticate, the geographic and spatial parameters of Chekov's play, to fuse in a sweeping allegorical gesture a series of concepts at once very distant and very close to home. It was a moment imbued with nostalgia and self-conscious reflection in which Pasqual, always attentive to the parallels that intertwine fiction with reality, offered his spectators, and specifically, the Barcelona theatre community at large, the opportunity to contemplate where they had been and how far they had come since the Lliure's first opening night on December 1, 1976. On that winter evening, nearly twenty-five yeats earlier, just minutes prior to the debut of Pasqual's CamÃ- de nit, the audience had stood before an empty stage and burst into spontaneous applause in recognition and anticipation of what was to follow. The ovation, as Joan-Anton Benach recalls, was dedicated to "la nada que no habÃ-a ocurrido. Al todo que intuÃ-amos iba a ocurrir [...] a unas paredes, a un campo de operaciones que estaba por estrenar" (52). In Pasqual's production of L'hort dels cirerers, the doubly coded image of Lizaran/Ranyevskaya wistfully embracing her Lliure/home represented a farewell of sorts and a subtle homage to the theatrical space that the Lliure's repertory company had occupied for nearly a quarter century The Lliure's original home, unlike the cherry orchard, though, managed to avoid any danger of loss or destruction; in fact, it is still in use today. But on the night of the première in February 2000, the future of the space remained unclear as the Lliure prepared to embark upon a new stage in its artistic evolution. The Teatre Lliure was founded in 1976 under the direction of Lluis Pasqual, Pere Planella, Fabià Puigserver, and Carlota Soldevila as a private collective with public aspirations. Its original performance space, the site of Pasqual's production of Chekov's play, is located in the Gracia district of Barcelona, in a late-nineteenthcentury building that once belonged to the Catalan workers cooperative La Lleialtat. Faithful to its name and establishment during the democratic transition, the Lliure—both the building and the resident company—has always stood as an emblem...