the scarlet letter

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the scarlet letterAngélica LiddellAtra Bilis Teatro

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The Scarlet Letter

Art without limitations

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date & starting time Sat 8 June 2019, 8.30 pmSun 9 June 2019, 8.30 pm

venueInternationaal Theater Amsterdam, Grote Zaal

running time1 hour 45 minutesno interval

language Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Englishwith Dutch and English surtitles

introduction 7.45 pmby Jonathan Offereins

meet the artist with performersmoderator Jonathan OffereinsSun 9 June – after the performance

credits

text, staging, scenography, costumes and actingAngélica Liddell

freely inspired by the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne

with Joele Anastasi, Tiago Costa, Conor Thomas Doherty, Julian Isenia, Angélica Liddell, Borja López, Tiago Mansilha, Daniel Matos, Nuno Nolasco, Antonio Pauletta, Antonio L. Pedraza, Sindo Puche

light Jean Huleu

sound Antonio Navarro

stage manager Nicolas Legrand Chevalier

production Sindo Puche

production assistants Borja López, Saite Ye

communication Génica Montalbano

world premiere 6 December 2018CDN d’Orléans, Orléans

websiteAngélica Liddell

notes

The 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, which forms the basis for the theatre production of the same name by Angélica Liddell, is one of the best-known and most-read works of American literature. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne sets the story in the puritanical Boston of the 17th century, where young Hester Prynne is on trial for adultery. After not having seen her husband in years, she has a baby from a secret affair. That’s a sin according to the Bible, and is considered a disgrace to society. Hester is sentenced to wear the letter ‘A’ for adultery on her clothes and is banished from the community. After years of remaining silent, the reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, tortured by guilt and love, confesses to being the father and dies moments later. It turns out that an ‘A’ is carved into his skin, over his heart. 

the scarlet letter by Angélica Liddell

‘The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human vir-tue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.’ So writes Nathaniel Hawthorne on the open-ing page of The Scarlet Letter. It is inevitable that we will commit crimes as irreversible as death itself, as irreversible as that first-ever murder by one brother of the other. So let me be a criminal then! The woman speaking to you here is someone who kills, flees, desecrates. Only those who love are exposed to insult.

The poet remains a stranger in a regulated world. I owe my em-broidered letter to the judges, because without puritanism, with-out judgment and without punishment, the letter would not exist. The letter is connected both to the crime and to the punishment, in part because we measure the degree of oppression in a societyby its punishments. The moment it is meted out, the punishment paints a portrait of its own deformity; the crime, on the other hand, reflects the desire for freedom. (These are bad times, in which immorality is confused with criminality.) Art will always be transgressive, because it turns the social rules upside down and moulds immorality into ethics.

Thanks to the strength of poetry, the stage enables us to pierce our hearts with a swordfish without dying. It gives us a way to kill with roses as our ammunition. This is how we’re generous: we kill with volleys of flowers, not with bullets made from lead. That’s why expression is superior to insult. Expression is our sickness; expres-sion is the monster that Hester (the heroine of Hawthorne’s novel) gives birth to, like Raphael’s Madonna with a monstrous saviour child in her arms; expression is what we will never see in the trans-lucent heart of Arthur, Hawthorne’s guilt-ridden priest. To resume Georges Didi-Huberman’s train of thought: Eve becomes Mary. The immoral becomes ethical. You need the sickness of Hester and Arthur to find salvation. You need art, if only in order to con-demn it. Before your icy tribunals we bring fever and ferment. No creation without disease. No Mary without Eve. ‘Beauty was linked with suffering and suffering with salvation,’ Henry Miller writes. You need the power of love.

I won’t let go of your hand as long as you haven’t hit me with it. I’m 52 years old; I can neither read nor write. When I cut off a piece of meat and submerge it in a pot of boiling water, it doesn’t cook; it stays raw. I can’t hear well either – I just hear strange, separate words. The demons are doing all of that for me. I’m old enough to deal with them. Unless it’s just my job to prattle like an idiot. I wish that were true, then I’d be able to give the best of myself. The worst thing of all is it can no longer have a title, a subject, a beginning. I can’t start at the beginning anymore, there is no way. That’s why this piece is about the inability to flee; it’s a piece that accepts punishment and nightmares as the origins of beauty – in other words, it’s the work of a criminal. Suffer me that I may speak, because I love you.

- - -with permission by La Colline – théâtre national, Paris

by Karen Welling

‘My hands are usually bare in my normal life, but once I get on stage, I put on my boxing gloves. Ordinary life functions thanks to hypocrisy and repression. The stage is a place for me to break free from these things. A monster emerges from this place of absolute freedom, one that is prepared to tell you what is happening in the world. The theatre allows you to rip through the limits of decency. Decency holds you back in this type of work. What I do is a type of pornography – I call it pornography of the soul. I say what can’t be said or confessed. Power is one of the driving forces of life, much like rage, fury, horror, and suffering. It inspires me to work. I am in my element where there is conflict, fighting or violence. The stage is a battlefield.’

art without limitations

In an interview with the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles from 2011, Liddell explained what drives her in no uncertain terms. Her theatre work is filled with her obsessions: death, sex, perversion, revenge, bodily fluids, horror, beauty and the human predispo-sition for evil, incest, rape, and suicide. Fuelled by despair and rage, she takes an in-depth look at what hides in the darkest, most dangerous depths of the human soul. Liddell’s performances always touch on social power structures, on the violence that is linked to them and the impossibility of love. Her radical physical theatre explores every aspect of pain and suffering to reflect a society that is fundamentally flawed. This also makes her work extremely personal. ‘I try to transform pain into beauty,’ she says. In her earlier plays, she wasn’t afraid of stabbing needles into her fingertips or applying a razor to her knees. They are perfor-mances that recall self-mutilation in visual art, as found in work by Marina Abramovic: it is gruesome, yet still possesses a unique, poetic beauty.

Angélica Liddell was hailed by the French press as a shock discovery of the Festival d’Avignon in 2010. At that time, Liddell had already been working in underground Spanish performance theatre with her Atra Bilis Teatro ensemble for more than fifteen years. The compa-ny’s name refers to the black bile that was deemed to be the cause of melancholy in the Middle Ages. Liddell embraces the concept behind the role of physicality: she also believes that ‘everything must pass through the body to reach the soul’. All her performances are steeped in this; melancholy is Liddell’s ‘insurmountable issue’. The two productions that were performed at the festival in Avignon, La casa de la fuerza (‘The house of strength’) and El año de Ricardo (‘The year of Richard’), made Angélica Liddell the talk of the town. The plays were completely sold out – people waited by the door hoping to get in. Following her first performance in Avignon, a place she regularly returns to, Angélica Liddell was suddenly propelled to the top of the European theatre world. International stages were chomping at the bit to present her work.

Angélica made her Dutch début with the play El año de Ricardo in the Frascati theatre in Amsterdam the year after. The pitch-black two-hour monologue, a physical and verbal eruption, is one long, intense, offensive and vulgar tirade about the mechanisms of power and violence. Angélica Liddell didn’t need a fake hunch-back to play Richard III – her Richard is completely deformed and evil to the core. The rhythm of the play corresponds to the ups and downs of an emotional roller coaster, from peaceful moments, silence and music to dizzying eruptions. ‘As you stagger outside,

you won’t quite know what’s hit you. However, be in no doubt that something has,’ according to De Standaard.

Liddell does not stage stories with clear endings; she bombards the audience with clues for them to investigate further. She freely mines the rich scope of literary, philosophical and Christian tra-ditions. The inspiration for the title of the play she performed for the first time in 2012 on the main stage at the Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam came from the Book of Jeremiah: Maldito sea el hombre que confía en el hombre (‘Cursed is the man who trusts in man’). Un projet d’alphabetisation, the subtitle of the play, is based on the French language course Liddell had to take years ago. In a painted enchanted forest on the stage, a group of (Dutch) girls are learning the French alphabet. Each letter is asso-ciated with a word that refers to an unhappy childhood and the loss of innocence: the E is for enfant (child), the L is for loup (wolf), the M is for mefiance (mistrust). The enchanted forest is gradually inhabited by sculptures of lifeless, wounded bodies created by visual artist Enrique Marty, which Liddell positions besides a few stunning Chinese acrobats. Liddell is a fan of contrasts in imagery and text, and also in the music she uses; this performance inter-sperses O Solitude by Purcell with Paint it Black by The Rolling Stones.

Current affairs also often provide the impetus for new produc-tions. Liddell previously explored the wave of femanticide in Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, the misery of the Balkans and the plight of refugees reaching the coast of Spain in boats. In her own inimitable way, Todo el cielo sobre la tierra: El síndrome de Wendy (‘All the sky above the earth: Wendy’s syndrome), which was per-formed in Amsterdam at the end of 2013, linked the story of Peter Pan, the boy who never wanted to grow up, to the deadly blood-bath caused by Anders Breivik in Norway, Neverland with the island of Utøya, and Wendy with the syndrome named after her which turns a deep separation anxiety into extreme mothering. It is a grim paradox, one in which children don’t want to (or aren’t al-lowed to) grow up and where an elderly Chinese couple dance an eternal waltz on stage to hold onto their youth. Liddell’s theatre is ironic and filled with sinister contemporary fairy tales, which also incorporates a mixture of text, music, performance, visual art and physicality to form an incredibly rich tapestry of images.

The international success of her work has enabled Liddell to col-laborate with prestigious theatres and festivals. Over the past 25 years, Liddell’s art has developed from a more intimate perfor-mance format to monumental works with a number of performers

for the big stage. Even Liddell’s own role seems to be changing. In her début at the Holland Festival in 2015, You are my destiny (Lo stupro di Lucrezia), Liddell performed in a new guise. In contrast to her previous work, where she is often the central focus, she stayed in the background. She only appears at the end when she sweeps the floor of old wives’ tales that appease people during an explo-sion. You are my destiny forms the first part of her ‘Resurrection cycle’ in which she searches for belief and spirituality – without hope of redemption. Primera carta de San Pablo a los Corintios, which was performed a year later in Amsterdam, formed the final part of this cycle. The Bible is a constant source of inspiration for Liddell, particularly the Song of Solomon in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Using a stage set that is dominated by a life-size copy of the Venus of Urbino by Titian, Liddell transforms the apostle’s letter into an ode to carnal, erotic passion. She transforms the mystical process, turning the theatre into a church and the stage into an altar. She doesn’t believe in God, but she wants to live as though he exists to ‘experience the cruelty of his absence’. The struggle that Angélica Liddell enacts on her battlefield remains the same. Just as Lucrezia in You are my destiny does not want to be a victim of her rape, but rightly rebels against the de-mand for virtue and political correctness on earth, in The Scarlet Letter, Liddell poses the question of whether the sin in paradise was more of a deliberate transgression, prompted by a desire to burn with passion. This new production, presented by the Holland Festival, brings together many elements from Liddell’s earlier work. Liddell no longer provides explanations or gives interviews. ‘Offering explanations is lying!’ It is clear that Liddell’s anger about the hypocrisy of today’s society is still as frank and fierce as ever, even after all these years. In this piece, anger is directed against the limits that this society, driven by political correctness, wants to place on art. Liddell fights against this form of repres-sion, using a range of theatrical elements that set her work apart. Liddell sees the stage as a free space; it is a boxing ring, where artists can exorcise their demons and can speak freely, which isn’t possible anywhere else. Art, more specifically, the art of Angélica Liddell, mustn’t have any limitations placed on it.

Angélica Liddell (1966, Figueras) is a theatre-maker, writer and performer from Spain. After studying psychology and dramatic arts, in 1993 she founded her own company in Madrid: Atra Bilis Teatro, or ‘black bile theater’. The body and religious symbolism feature prom-inently in Liddell’s works for the stage. Defying theatrical conventions, her work is as extreme and controversial as it is poetic. In 2010, she gained international acclaim with two productions: La casa de la fuerza, about the murders of women and children in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, and El año de Ricardo, an adap-tation of Shakespeare’s Richard III that explores various manifestations of politics and the abuse of power. Atra Bilis became a recurring guest at the Avignon Festival, where Maldito sea el hombre que confía en el hombre was presented in 2011, Ping Pang Qiu and Todo el cielo sobre la tierra (El síndrome de Wendy) in 2013, and ¿Que hare yo con esta espada? in 2016 – the second part of the Trilogía del infinito.

Angélica Liddell made her debut at the Holland Festival in 2015 with You are my destiny (Lo stupro di Lucrezia). Over the years, her work has received numerous prestigious awards, such as the 2012 National Dramatic Literature Award for La casa de la fuerza in her home country, and the Silver Lion for Theatre at the Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2017, the French Ministry of Culture appointed her Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

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textAngélica Liddell (with permission by La Colline – théâtre national, Paris)Karen Welling

text editorKaren Welling

translationHelen Ainsley, Emma Rault design thonik

lay-out Mark Drillich, Erna Theys

photography© Bruno Simao

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