COMING UP AT TROUBLEYN/LABORATORIUM ANTWERP
Language: Spanish & Catalan spoken | English surtitles
TICKETS: € 10,00
| Friday 27 November TRY-OUT (18:30 - 22:30) | TICKETS |
The performance is four hours long, with no intermission.
Audience members are welcome to enter and leave the theatre as they please.
Light snacks (chips, chocolate, fruit) and drinks are available for purchase from our bar before, during and after the performance.
WHO REMEMBERS THE DONKEYS?
“I am not interested in presenting Spanish misery as a problem to be explained, but as an experience to be lived through. A misery that is not merely economic, but also intellectual, moral, spiritual and emotional. A misery we have inherited and, in some way, learned to love.” — Alexandre Rodríguez i Fons, director
Writer, director and performer Alexandre Rodríguez i Fons, whose artistic practice includes his work with the Spanish company La Casa de Asterión, is currently in residence at Troubleyn/Laboratorium in Antwerp. As part of his residency, he presents a special try-out of Who Remembers the Donkeys?, a four-hour theatrical journey into the darkest corners of Spanish history. Drawing on Nietzsche’s vision of tragic theatre as a celebration of life in all its beauty and horror, the performance transforms centuries of collective memory into a feverish spectacle in which cruelty and tenderness, laughter and despair collide.
Spain becomes a theatrical landscape of images, memories and ruins, where centuries of history collide in a grotesque dream. From the poverty and social hypocrisy of Lazarillo de Tormes, the celebrated 16th-century Spanish satire, to the disturbing visions of Francisco Goya, the shadows of the Franco dictatorship and the contradictions of contemporary capitalism, past and present become indistinguishable. The dead continue to speak. The gods still demand sacrifices.
Inspired by Goya’s Los Caprichos (1799), his celebrated series of satirical prints exposing the darker aspects of human nature, the performance unfolds through a succession of striking theatrical images. Hooded monks surrender to the rhythms of a rave, rival kings compete in absurd displays of power, and the Shaman of Capital preaches a new religion of money and consumption. Through dance, grotesque humour and powerful physical imagery, the sacred and the vulgar, beauty and horror collide.
At the heart of this theatrical purgatory is a lost child, Xiquet, a tender Valencian word for child. Searching for his way home, he encounters the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who becomes his guide through a world suspended between life and death. Yet the child's innocence offers no escape from the horror. Born into a history he did not choose, he must confront what he has inherited, while his three questions of Truth shape a journey in which understanding does not necessarily bring answers.
“We want to liberate ourselves from our parents, our gods, our institutions and our History; yet we also want to return home. We want to stop being children, while remaining afraid of growing up.” — Alexandre Rodríguez i Fons
Who Remembers the Donkeys? is a theatrical ritual of excess and purification, confronting everything humanity would prefer to forget and the impossibility of entirely escaping what we have inherited. An orgiastic celebration of Spanish misery, and a provocative reflection on the world we are leaving behind.
Text & direction: Alexandre Rodríguez i Fons
Production: Raül Perales
Assistant: Inés J. Borrell
Light design: Andrés Piza
Performed by: Ivette Codina, Ariadna Colomer Daviu, Natàlia Mas, Giorgia Paolillo, Alexandre Rodríguez i Fons, Zula Ros, Héctor Vidondo i Julieta Vilà
Photographer: Mateo Ibarra
Residency at Troubleyn/Jan Fabre
With sincere thanks to Troubleyn/Jan Fabre, Fabra i Coats, Palau Alòs, Teatre Kaddish
