The inversion of a language and its apocryphal dimension made the play The stubbornnesspremiered in 2017 at the Cervantes Theatera detachment from the Borgesian universe in the hands of Rafael Spregelburd. Those characters who could not escape language, understood as a matrix that transmits a certain need for invention, turned them into authors of dislocated plots as a scenic manifestation of an intelligence that was outdated in its encyclopedist quality.
Rafael Spregelburd is the first playwright to join the Argentine Academy of Letters and his plays, which have him as director and actor in a common writing gesture, seem like an adventure for a dazzling head that offers the exercises of his thought as a game where the whirlwind of his associations disbelieves in causal forms.
Your incorporation into the entity was voted unanimously and will occupy the José María Paz Chair. Spregelburd was proposed by academics Jorge Dubatti, Eduardo Álvarez Tuñón, Rafael Felipe Oteriño and Santiago Sylvester.
“For fifteen days I have been a member of the Argentine Academy of Letters,” he himself said on social networks. It is about an unexpected distinction, but above all an invitation to pure amazement. Today I had to appear there for my first session; We vote on things, we give out prizes, we have tea. The warmth and affection with which these academics from very diverse disciplines linked to literature welcomed me as one of their own has been moving. My inclusion – I think I understand – comes to settle an old debt“This Academy did not have playwrights.”
His appointment serves, in this interview, to reflect on the conflict between literature and theater that revives that separation between orality and writing where the spoken word comes to defend a wilder aesthetic possibility.
–It seems to me that this appointment indicates, in some way, the literary imprint of your dramaturgy, especially in the ways in which that literary power becomes a theatrical procedure. In some way, your generation, which began to premiere works in the nineties and was called New Dramaturgy, came to resolve, to a large extent, that dichotomy between theater and literature.
–We inherited a scene that was the daughter of the Parakultural phenomenon, of democratic openness, a very strong genetic mark in my generation that, we did not know at that time, was aligned with the theories of postdrama that appeared in the theoretical field a little later but in the practical field, a long time before Hans Thies Lehmann spoke of this phenomenon and thought of it as counter-literary, even opposed to the text. But when people talked about us as a new dramaturgy we said; We write dramaturgy because depending on who makes the argument that the new can be pejorative, instead of being an invitation to join the very long cultural tradition of any country. But yes, my theater has a more literary anchor than that of other colleagues of my generation, but I would like to point out a more interesting phenomenon. I am a disciple of Ricardo Bartís as an author and as a director and he was a fervent defender that theater had to achieve its specificity away from the literary discipline. The theater was a kind of laboratory on space-time that passed in real time on the space of the scene and the texts born from that birth were different from literary texts, they were not the speculation of a desk person imagining a text that Later he was going to be represented by others as a kind of operatives of those ideas. There was an enormous fervor to defend the idea of an autonomy that if it had to stop being literary in order to be theater, it was preferable that we disassociate ourselves from that aspect. Over time it happened that those canonical texts written by Ricardo Bartís were published as dramatic literature.. Why is a text of these characteristics published, other than to read it? To consider it the driving force of a new montage far removed, perhaps, from the spatio-temporal ideas that gave rise to it. I continue to believe in the autonomy of the theatrical word because the theatrical word is always indexical, it always depends on a here and now that is constructed in the moment and that is the enormous difference it has with literature. This autonomy means that some of the pieces forged in the enthusiasm of fleeing from literature are lost because they were consumed in their fleeting nature.. Today we would understand them as performative expressions. What happened with my theater is that since it was very readable, it settled more comfortably in the middle of that discussion. A discussion that gives me a huge ace of spade when none other than Cesar Aira points out the importance of the bearda literary revulsive text, made of immediacy, scarcity, unbridled attitudes. A transgender soap opera in the midst of the crisis of 2001 where there was no money to produce it and that phenomenon, given that it was edited by Entropía, reached the hands of César Aira who recognized that there was an attitude of renewal in Argentine theater that he was not seeing in literature.
–The stubbornness It seems to me to be a work very marked by the Borgesian heritage, especially in the games with language. I think that theater has more of that Borgesian way of reading than literature.
–Yes, I agree. Borges is a genetic mark very present in my texts but I don’t know if that gives them greater literary quality. If someone wrote a literary work with Borgesian aspects we would consider them an imitator. I have the advantage of being a playwright and, if there are Borgesian aspects, these are celebrated and not taken as a copy because, given that Borges never wrote theater, we do not know how he would have done it. I consider myself a pure and simple playwright.. There is the honorable exception of The diaries of Captain Hipólito Parrilla (Entropía – 2018, arising from the filming log of Zama, by Lucrecia Martel) which is my only novel. I agree with you on the Borgesian elements, what I wonder is if that makes the work more literary, I don’t think so because those Borgesian elements that I usually take have to do with paradoxes, with time, given that theater is always an experiment about time. The stubbornness It is a very clear example: the same hour broken down into three parts that happens three times depending on the point of view. Those who once inspired you condemnation now inspire you pity. How every perversion in time produces moral consequences
–I didn’t say it because of a greater literary entity but because of the ludic capacity of the theater and because of the very dynamics of staging games with language, the apocryphal.
–Borges is very playful, each of his works invites me to learn the rules of the game. What happens with Borges, perhaps because of the canonization of his prose, is that it is more difficult to take him as a joke while theater is always a joke. The worst of tragedies shows that we are fakes, we are staging the death of someone who does not really die. All the questions that theater has to ask itself to generate verisimilitude are different from those that literature asks. Literature can be allowed, even to the point of solemnity.
–I don’t agree with the definition of New Dramaturgy either, but it seems to me that in your generation there was another relationship with the public and, in that connection, another writing was generated.
–Lehman’s concept of postdrama came to cross that border because he considered Pina Bausch, Tadeuz Kantor and Robert Wilson, authors who are very old for us, as postdramatists. This makes us think how closed in on herself the playwright was in the 70s, even at the beginning of the 80s, so that the appearance of a small group of authors with other concerns, who jumped over the old dichotomy between absurdist versus realists which was what colored the 50s, 60s, 70s and above all the use of the representation of the middle class as an absolute paradigm of the quality of theater because, with very few exceptions, it seems to me that theater achieved its juiciest vein when it He was didactic and showed the middle class its contradictions. When the Parakultural phenomenon appears and all the limits of the important, the unspeakable, the horrible are overcome and purely recreational models can be put on stage, as happened in the experiences of Urdapilleta, Tortonese, Batato Barea in Rojas, which are texts or lines that made a lot of sense at the time and now are seen less or not at all, but I am a product of thinking that theater is what those people did. That I then write The stubbornnessdoes not mean that the theatricality that I propose is full of symptoms of that Parakultural theatricality, of unconnected jokes of all kindsI call them symptoms of an absent force where the representation of the middle class is no longer the objective of the quality of our theater.
–The dimension of representation is totally embedded in the textual production of this dramaturgy. That body on stage builds the dramaturgy. There is no separation between the text and its subsequent representation.
–I would like to remember an example of a great artist like Federico León when he writes The Angel Boethius Museum which is his work on the Malvinas Museum (within the framework of the Museums Project curated by Vivi Tellas) and puts on stage an alleged ex-combatant who was not an actor, who said the texts that were being dictated to him by cockroach at the time and presented his own body as proof of the delirium that was that war. Federico León bombed the literary and theatrical tradition of that time (1998) because he was valued and, at the same time, highly criticized and he was the origin of biodrama before the word existed. If you look at the current programming of international festivals, most of the shows are performance or biodramas. I am even more literary than before when faced with those options because I am much more interested in fiction.in the same way that Federico León was interested in the lying part of that Malvinas Museum.
–Returning to your appointment at the Argentine Academy of Letters, I think that just as there are several playwrights who won the Nobel Prize, it seems to me that the case of Bob Dylan, as a song lyricist, points more clearly to the expansion of the notion of what is understood. for literature.
–I think it is to celebrate (and not to criticize any delay) the fact that they have finally become friends with the idea that a playwright also writes. In fact, my next proposal is going to be to also include film scripts. I think that Mariano Llinas, if we talk about Borges, could perfectly be within the Academy of Letters. The academy has been oriented towards philology and linguistics, which are the hard core of all language academies because their task is to regulate, expand and enrich the creation of the dictionary of the Spanish language. However, there are a lot of other things that are done by and for the language, among them, the sovereign independence of the regionalisms of Castilian. At the academy we have a linguist like Eleonora Acuña, who is a specialist in dialectology. What are the letters? Only those dictated by Madrid or those that make language and speech work? I believe that inviting a playwright (I am one of twenty-four members) implies recognizing a different use of the language that is its pure orality. As you know, I am a voracious reader, very interested in linguistics and what happens at the heart of languages, I am a lazy polyglot and I believe that the incorporation of a playwright signals that there is a use of the language that is intended to be spoken and that it is very important. One often has to write badly in a dialogue for the scene to be believable. By this I mean that theater goes far beyond the problem of writing as one speaks because it is about writing so that, at the moment in which that word resonates, the connotations added by the fact of being theater are more important than what is denoted by the text. Only the actor knows about this type of writing.