Zarzuela bursts into kyiv in the course of the battle | Culture | EUROtoday

The music is acquainted and kind of recognizable phrases like “La Manchi” or “Ciudad Realu” generally emerge from the textual content. On the stage of a theater corridor from 1902 with a baroque inside with intense gilding and crimson seats, the austerity of a La Mancha city is displayed. In the background, saffron fields, windmills and landscapes with which to journey and escape, even for 2 hours, someplace in La Mancha, removed from kyiv, from the specter of missiles and anti-aircraft alerts, from battle.

The zarzuela The saffron rosewhich premiered this Friday on the National Operetta Theater in kyiv earlier than a “very warm and excited” viewers, has change into, due to stage director Ignacio García, one other image of Ukrainian resistance towards Russia. The texts about peace, justice and freedom extracted from Don Quixote resonate with an viewers that finds in theater “spiritual food,” in accordance with García, and “a meeting space, a place to have fun and disconnect.”

Theater halls are packed in Ukraine. The live performance ones too. The Operetta Theater has all of the tickets offered till January. Before the large-scale invasion, many performs have been carried out in Russian. Now it’s unthinkable. The repertoire has been full of Ukrainian operettas, musicals resembling Chicago o The Adams Familyand now, for the primary time in its 90-year historical past, a zarzuela. García leaves after the premiere, however The saffron roseco-produced by the Spanish Embassy in Ukraine, stays on this system.

The play, a rural love drama with a social background, has many analogies that deliver it nearer to Ukraine. “The rural world, the wheat fields, the saffron fields… Values ​​that have to do with effort, difficulties, seasons and uncertainty in the harvest are engraved here,” explains the director.

García, a 47-year-old from Madrid, throws phrases in Ukrainian, English and Spanish on the group throughout rehearsal. “Art has a universal language and in the end we always understand each other,” he displays as he continues the efficiency within the stalls, the place there’s additionally a performer. The set and costumes of the play are made in Ukraine however are replicas of the manufacturing that premiered in Spain, crochet collars included. “Povilno!”, he asks the actors at one level to decrease their tone somewhat. An necessary a part of the work has been, nevertheless, the alternative: making certain that the corporate built-in “the impetus and temperament of Spanish music and art”, however in a pure means.

The affect of battle

An anti-aircraft alert sounds and it’s time to cease work to take shelter. If it occurs in the course of the efficiency, the general public has to go to a close-by metro cease. When the interruption lasts greater than an hour, they’ll return one other day. People pay little consideration to the alarms anymore, however the theater is previous and the foundations are revered. During the day by day blackouts, they rehearse with LED lights nearly in darkness.

García, who has traveled to the nation eight occasions because the battle started in February 2022, can be used to it. “It’s more uncomfortable than anything else. The moments of fear are specific: when you are sleeping and you hear the alarm or explosions, or when you are on the train and you see the anti-aircraft guns.” The Ukrainians thank him for his braveness in coming to deliver a overseas work, particularly after a French group canceled the day earlier than his arrival. Before the battle, worldwide exchanges have been frequent.

The soprano Yana Tatarova-Tsutskiridze, or Sagrario, combed along with her character’s bun and wearing a grey shirt and lengthy black skirt, says within the dressing room, in the course of the half hour that the alarm lasts: “Ignacio asks for a lot of expressiveness and we are not accustomed.” “At a certain point, my character explodes, and that, which is not typical for us, is very interesting for someone creative,” he continues.

“The audience is going to be filled with these emotions, with the goodness of the work,” believes the actress. “Ukrainians need them and this music is very rich, it fills you,” he says. Along with the orchestra, castanets and tambourines from La Mancha play, and jotas and seguidillas are danced.

The virtually total group is Ukrainian, and they’re all-rounders. In the morning they rehearse a zarzuela and within the afternoon they carry out Chicago. García has been working with them for a yr, with intermittent visits. On November 25, he returned with Ana Cris, manufacturing assistant, to complete off the final three weeks earlier than the premiere. In his absence, a member of the corporate led the rehearsals, whom he needed to persuade to go away his inventive mark in order that the work had a Ukrainian sensitivity. It wasn’t simple. “They are very hierarchical,” he says, and he didn’t wish to intervene with García’s directives.

The translation was a goldsmith’s job. As the director says, the primary line already provides an thought of ​​the issue of adapting the textual content: “Although I am from La Mancha, I do not stain don’t you”. The translator labored by becoming every syllable with every observe, however in accordance with García, Ukrainian has sufficient flexibility to permit phrases to be modified with out altering the which means of the sentences.

The Spanish artist hopes to contribute to the Ukrainian trigger with the “healing and therapeutic capacity of art.” Dressed in vishivanka, the shirt with typical Ukrainian embroidery, he says that “the war is not in the city, but it is in the people.” The firm is not any stranger to it. There are fallen comrades on the entrance and others who proceed preventing. There are additionally fathers and husbands on the battlefield or captured by Russian troops.

Tatarova-Tsutskiridze tried to persuade her husband to not volunteer to go to the entrance. He achieved it in 2022, however the next yr he enlisted. “If I don’t go, who is going to go,” he instructed him. He is on the zero line, in an assault brigade. “In the theater I can completely disconnect,” says the actress, smiling. “We need these things like air to breathe. We need different emotions to distract ourselves.”