‘Ayoub’: concerning the irreverence of romantic love and the decadence of the West | Culture | EUROtoday

“I am not Roberta Marrero,” is heard at one level within the work. And it’s also made clear to us that the factor isn’t about feminism or LGTBIQ+ acronyms and “those topics that can ensure that you are programmed right now in Europe.” First dart: in direction of what’s so obligatory (the struggle for equality) when it turns into a development. And from this place, the place the writer and performer factors out, moderately than warning us, one of many many irreverences that make up Marina Otero’s (Argentina, 41 years outdated) speech of stage autofiction is launched. Without proof of wanting to impress, like somebody who would not need the factor. Then one of many successes of this work turns into clear: the power to query as if one didn’t need to achieve this.

On this event, with absolutely the premiere of Ayoub on the Madrid Autumn Festival, That spherical journey that entails inserting your individual life on the heart of the creative, that’s, inserting your self personally to, with a bit of luck, attain the common, the Argentine creator goes past the purely autobiographical to succeed in the political and human denunciation, in a clearer and extra severe method than in earlier productions.

To her psychological well being issues, her obsession for a person to save lots of her from loneliness (one of many bravest and most inconvenient feats in opposition to what she has typically known as “feminist correction”), the tendency in direction of romantic love, violence and self-destruction (“I would like to have love, but I have anger,” is heard), is added on this new montage the devastating second that humanity is experiencing because of the genocide suffered by Gaza and all these masks which are falling to disclose a festering West (“you are old and rotten like Europe. In this sense, an anecdote about including words and phrases such as “genocide” and “Free Palestine” in a show, and the recommendation not to do so by a German programmer, begins the work and defines a context (scenic, vital), in a neat and very effective way. With only a couple of elements, Otero’s motionless body, among them.

Ayoub follows the format of previous montages in which the performer tells how the work that is being seen was born and that it is constructed through text, projections of home videos, photographs and screenshots of conversations. Although with much less dance or practically none than in previous pieces. As if his body (very worked out, defined, in shape) also rebelled against what could be expected of him on stage and was reduced to holding the word. Also to shake her, like when she transforms into a metal vocalist and is overwhelming.

A few years and a few plays ago, the author decided to turn her life into a stage work. So created the project Remember to live, which he intends to continue feeding until the end of his days, and there he has included works such as Andrea, Fuck me, Love me y Kill me, these last three with which she was known in Spain. And although with this autofiction speech Otero does not discover scenic or performative places nor does he reach places that have not already been visited 140 times since Marina Abramovich’s “I am the performance,” not trying to champion anything, or at least that is what it seems, crystallizes in one of the greatest successes. There is no obvious pose, and although the text sometimes borders on the commonplace, in general the difficult truth of bringing life to a stage is achieved. Without the exhibitionist provocation of the most difficult yet. But like that “hair in the cottage cheese or fart in the elevator,” which Lorrie Moore wrote.

The seventy minutes of this conference performative They pass at a good pace in an agile, coherent dramaturgy that naturally combines the multiple themes discussed. The final twist is somewhat prolonged in which the possibility of an imagined life occupies the space through the actor Ibrahim Ibnou Goush. After passing through the Replika room in Madrid (today the 15th is the last day), Ayoub will travel to the Estación Alta festival in Girona on November 22 with two performances (at 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.).