Tag: Music

Since 2018 Bambalina Teatre Practicable is touring with their two-performers and several puppets staging of La Celestina. An adaptation by Jaime Policarpo, an actor and an actress impersonate all characters and interact with them on stage, their presence being represented by personalised puppets of their heads. The art of the figurines (character design) is quite interesting, with a dark air and hyperexpressive eyes, which seem to have been transferred to the puppets as well. I wonder if the staging and the text also share such an atmosphere. Unfortunately, I will have to keep wondering as there is no performance planned in my vicinity.

This is not the first staging of Celestina with puppets. The adaptation of Darío Galo for Carolina Calema, which I neither could see but has been reviewed in Celestinesca and can be watched for educational purposes –and with a horrible sound and image quality– in Youtube, has been touring Spain and Latin America from 2016 to 2018. In it, Carolina Calema played both the role of Celestina and of the puppeteer and storyteller, which conveyed a quite obvious symbolism: Celestina as the person behind the plot and directing the fates of all characters. In the case of the staging by Bambalina Teatre, it seems that the actors impersonate Calisto and Melibea, so that they are the only alive, human characters in a world of puppets controlled by someone else, with no will of their own, as well as the central point of the plot, unlike most modern stagings, in which Celestina tends to be the central character. However, nothing is explicitly said about this symbolism in the correspoding dossiers of Bambalina Teatre or Calema Producciones.

Very different is my interest in the musical adaptation by Jesús García-Consuegra (music) and Marcos Fernández-Espartero (staging) for Molto Vivace, a chorus and occasional theatre company of the Spanish town of Daimiel (Ciudad Real). It consists of 17 songs that are conceived as a compromise between the 16 and the 21 acts of, respectively, the Comedia and the Tragicomedia, but which in reality correspond to each act of the 21-act version, with some adaptations. Considering that this musical adaptation is made for a chorus and a few solists, I am really curious about how the choir and the solists interact, how solists interact among them, and which characters they represent: Do solists impersonate more than one character or is it always the same? In that case, which are the individualised characters that solists impersonate? Moreover, how the text has been adapted to fit just 17 songs intrigues me: Which are the acts ommitted or merged? Does it follow the same principles as the opera adaptations of Celestina or does the chorus format require a different kind of adaptations? I have my suspicions but…

Therefore, I would be very grateful if someone could provide me with the text (I cannot start anything with music) and/or a recording of the above mentioned shows (and, in general, of any performance related to Celestina like, for example, this one or this another) with research purposes. Invitations would be most welcomed but, unfortunately, I am not very mobile and I am really busy at the time (if I were not, you can bet I would already have attended Celestina, puta vieja, the adaptation by Doriam Sojo for El burdel a escena).