Núria Espert, awarded the 2024 Max Honor Award: “It has been a long time coming” | Culture | EUROtoday

The actress Núria Espert (Hospitalet de Llobregat, 88 years outdated) has been awarded the Max de Honor 2024, as introduced by the General Society of Authors and Editors (SGAE), organizer of the principle performing arts awards in Spain. The nice girl of theater will obtain the award on the award ceremony of this version, which can be held on July 1 in Tenerife. In a gathering with the press previous to this announcement, the performer confessed to being very excited, even if in her lengthy profession she has already achieved the very best recognitions: the Princess of Asturias (2016), the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes ( 2009) or the National Theater (1985). “It is a desired award that has been a long time coming. I really wanted her because it is the reward we give ourselves,” she commented, whereas saying that she may also be invested as a physician. Honorary by the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama subsequent week.

With a glance that has recognized tips on how to be fierce and tender, Espert has embodied virtually your complete creativeness of common dramaturgy: from Medea from Euripides to Barren from García Lorca, by Shakespeare, Molière, Brecht… “What makes you different from the rest?” they ask him in Catalan. “Theort“, reply. She provides after a number of seconds: “I'm also a hard worker.” At the age of 13 he was already a part of the kids's firm of Romea in Barcelona and what got here subsequent is historical past: 100 roles during which not a single necessary nationwide playwright has been lacking, tour by dozens of nations on a number of continents, expertise as director and in opera, the founding of a performing firm, a theater that bears her identify in Fuenlabrada…

Distinctions discover her working. The actress is within the ultimate a part of the tour The island of aira narrative a couple of household of 5 girls directed by Alejandro Palomas, and is getting ready to interpret two texts by the Canadian-Lebanese writer Wajdi Mouawad, of whom he has already interpreted Fires, one other of the good successes of his profession. As Fires, They are texts that additionally take care of household tales and that he tried to launch in 2020, however the undertaking was hindered by the pandemic. “I am terrified as always, with fear and insecurity. Afterwards, things calm down,” she says now that she has taken it up once more.

More than fifty years of expertise and he nonetheless feels the identical anxiousness that he felt when he launched himself into stardom with Medea, in 1955, when he was 18 years outdated. “It marked me a lot. I felt tragic,” he displays in entrance of journalists. What different function has left a mark on her profession? “I just can't choose one,” she says, however she mentions Mourning fits Electra properly., Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? The good particular person of Sezuan (embodying two characters: brothers Shen Te and Shui Ta) or The Lear King, within the male function of Lear. He later returns to modesty: “'I can say one thing where I was not good: The Tempest, of Shakespeare. “I didn't take the thing, I wasn't up to it.”

But if there is one author with whom Espert feels connected more than any other, it is Federico García Lorca. “We have played 60 gigs together,” she stated in an interview with EL PAÍS in 2019. It was exactly with a chunk from the Granada native, Barren, in 1971, when his profession reached a brand new turning level: greater than 2,000 performances, a four-year tour of the United States, Europe and Latin America, and a piece to which he would return for the following 15 years. The worldwide projection that she obtained then culminated in her debut as a director within the second half of the eighties. Her consecration on this aspect got here along with her debut in 1986 on the Liric Theater in London with Bernarda Alba's home, starring Glenda Jackson. She would go to 48 different nations as director, together with Japan. But her true vocation was on stage and never off it: “Directing causes great insecurity,” she would remark in 1987.

Digging into his reminiscences, darkish moments and repression of Franco's regime additionally seem. The piece The two executionersbeneath the route of Víctor García (one of many administrators with whom he labored probably the most, along with Lluís Pasqual and Mario Gas, was censored in 1959. Robles Piquer, head of Culture on the time, was livid when he noticed that the set was a tank and the accused of subversives. “We had to clench our fists and move forward. Those who continued with open fists and lamenting, disappeared. A bitter memory remains.” However, Vox's makes an attempt at censorship don’t worry him: ” We will not allow them,” she says confidently.

Espert was always critical of political interference in art and, in general, of the public entities that manage them. For example, in 1998 he said about the Ministry of Culture: “They think, I believe, that it is about distributing the four bitches that there are, and it seems to me that they should serve to create an environment where cultural people would not have more remedy than to flourish.” In 2017 she reproached “the lack of interest in culture of all political parties and governments, from Mariano Rajoy to Manuela Carmena in Madrid.”

She has also raised her voice in defense of women as the soul of the performing arts. “Feminism existed in theater before it was invented as a word,” she points out. “My profession is one of the most advanced in giving women their place, because if the text says that Rosaura enters, Rosaura has to enter, Pedro or Romeo cannot enter, and if her role is long they cannot discuss her salary as “They did it to my poor mom within the manufacturing unit.” As part of the campaign to decriminalize abortion in the Franco era, she signed, along with 199 other women related to the world of culture and art, a document in which they confessed to having had a voluntary abortion. “We were shameless. It was a provocation,” she recalls. In 2020 she declared: “May my colleagues forgive me, but I believe that we have better qualities to interpret. We are more moldable, we know how to put ourselves in danger. It is paradoxical: a man is constantly asked to expose himself… for him to expose himself like a woman.”

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