Much greater than the ‘Pretty Woman’ of the primary century: the TNC approaches Mary Magdalene exterior the cliché of the redeemed prostitute | News from Catalonia | EUROtoday

María Magdalena, María de Magdala, to whom the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (TNC) now dedicates a present that desires to strip her of clichés —Mary Magdaleneby director Carme Portaceli and with Ariadna Gil within the title function—has had a secondary and murky function in Christian custom that has typically relegated the character to the cliché of the repentant sinner (prostitute), the fallen girl redeemed by Jesus. In this there was apparently a sure mess, largely intentional, as a result of totally different ladies from the tales have been combined, such because the aforementioned Mary of Magdala (because of her native land, a port on the Sea of ​​Galilee), Mary of Bethany (the sister of the resurrected Lazarus and Martha), and a infamous prostitute from the identical metropolis of Bethany who would have merged with this second Mary.

In actuality, the unique Magdalene, a dubiously historic character, didn’t current any unfavourable trait (when it comes to the sin of the flesh) past having been possessed by seven demons from which Jesus freed her, and actually Matthew, Mark and John place her of their Gospels on the place of the Crucifixion, floor zero of the brand new religion. She can be thought of the one one who dared to go to the tomb of Christ, the one who noticed him resurrected—the well-known scene of “Noli and Tangere”do not contact me, do not maintain me—and the primary to speak the excellent news, so elementary to Christianity, of the Resurrection.

The amalgamated determine of Mary Magdalene was displayed for 2 millennia in a really profitable iconographic manufacturing, with milestones equivalent to the nice work by Titian, Caravaggio or Correggio, amongst others. And already in our time, the fashionable revisitation of her determine has produced creations as different – though all the time linked not directly to the archetype of the sinner – as the attractive story by Marguerite Yourcenar Mary Magdalene or salvation (initially printed in 1936 and picked up in Fires, Alfaguara, 1982) and wherein Mary throws herself into sin when her boyfriend abandons her on their marriage ceremony night time to go along with Jesus, who’s already competitors; the incarnation of the character in rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) taken up within the 1975 Spanish model with Camilo Sesto by Angela Carrasco (“I don’t know how to love him, he changed something in me”), or the catchy track by Sandra (I’ll by no means be) Maria Magdalenawith its vital references to pleasure. You have to attend for The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, who collected numerous loopy concepts from esotericism across the character and the Grail, in order that the Magdalene had a distinct function as spouse of Christ and mom of his kids.

“The bet of making Mary Magdalene “This season dedicated to women is to take up a story that has been systematically denied to us,” Carme Portaceli, director of the TNC and the production, which opens on Thursday the 22nd in the Sala Gran of the Barcelona theater, stated at the outset in the presentation of the show. Portaceli, who has had a top team, has linked the production, with text by Michael De Cock (translation into Catalan by Albert Boronat) and dramaturgy by the director herself and Inés Boza, to other directions yours as Mrs. Dalloway, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina o Bovary that reviewed great female figures of fiction. “Whether Mary Magdalene existed or not does not matter, she is an important part of our Judeo-Christian culture, and after the Virgin Mary, the woman most represented in Western iconography,” mentioned Portaceli, who has described the Magdalene because the archetype of the redeemed prostitute, “the Pretty Woman of the first century.” However, he continued, “and despite the fact that in many paintings she is seen crying repentant, none of the canonical Gospels tells us that she was a prostitute.”

Examining “how we came to this”, this mistaken fixation on the Magdalene, her relegation as a sinner when the unique story appears to indicate her as an essential disciple of Jesus, is on the foundation of the present, co-produced by the TNC and the KVS of Brussels (a really fruitful collaboration through the Portaceli interval).

This is what Ariadna Gil’s character, Miriam, asks herself, a scholar specializing in Mary Magdalene who travels to Barcelona from Brussels to present a convention on the topic. “It is very interesting to see how theater allows us to rethink things that we thought we knew, like the story of the Magdalene. We discovered that the archetype of the repentant sinner that we women had been taught is not true, it was a hoax, a fake”, indicated Portaceli.

Mary Magdalene takes the reviled figure to the present day, although there are some scenes with biblical references. Along with the character of the teacher played by Gil, who is involved in a complicated divorce, there are other women, and a taxi driver who accompanies her on her trips and is called Jesús. Miriam-Gil’s physical journey becomes an “initiatory journey” to the myth of the Magdalene, with live music and a symbolic scenography that includes projections in which pictorial representations and other immersive elements appear. De Cock has added that the work is an invitation to reflect on things that are misinterpreted, a “deconstruction” of the Magdalene to understand the lies and manipulations to which she has been the object and why. Boza has emphasized that the show looks at history from the point of view of women, trying to change it “listening iconography and oral tradition”.

For Ariadna Gil, it is “an unconventional show” in which the visual, the music and the scenic “are as fundamentally important as the interpretation to explain the story.” He has said that there is a part of information necessary to explain the evolution of the Magdalene since the Gospels and another plane of vital, spiritual transformation. “With Carme I always put myself at risk, an exciting risk,” said the actress. “Discovering that figure about whom I had never questioned anything and who had influenced me, like everyone else, without knowing to what extent, has been exciting.” The image of Magdalene as a sinner, she stated, “has marked us women even if we were unaware of it.”

The show, its creators have stressed, is multi-layered, and does not intend to defend Magdalena as a character of purity opposed to the image of the prostitute or to be reductionist or “fall into Dan Brown’s trap” with his supposed revelations, but rather to provide the viewer with documentary and reflective elements so that they can build their own opinion, their own path.

From the relationship between Magdalene and Jesus, Ariadna Gil believes that things can be deduced from the evangelical stories and the history of the time, such as that it would be logical for a man of Jesus’ age to be married. “Perhaps the most beloved of the apostles was actually the most beloved,” he suggested after remembering that Jesus Christ never speaks of celibacy. “It’s all clues,” she concluded while the image of the actress seemed to mix with that of Miriam, the lecturer. “In any case, we’re not right here to say what relationship that they had; what do I do know! What all this leads you to is to consider why somebody of such significance was reworked right into a prostitute. So many contradictions are what make this story so thrilling.”