Catalunya lives in a kind of indignant depression after the revelation of the disastrous results of the PISA report. As always happens in case of national defeat, fellow citizens debate between the proud display of the usual masochism in the tribe and the equally customary exercise of nostalgia for a past (non-existent, by the way) in which our teenagers read Kierkegaard even at lunchtime. Reality, as always, lies in the middle ground between anger and indifference. I think about it while listening to Francesc Orella reciting the Defense of Socrates in one of the most beautifully sordid corners of the Modelo prison, accompanied by my dearest musician Rafel Plana, in front of three hundred people delighted to be cold listening to one of the foundational texts of our culture. Among the audience, bad news for the nostalgic, there are many young people.
It is irrelevant whether these kids are here attracted by the Merlinesque fame of one of our best actors or by any other contingency of life. The reality is that they freak out (or whatever the hell it's called now) listening to how their concerns connect perfectly with unparalleled words written more than two millennia ago. This has happened in other classic readings of this sister festival of the Bernat Metge collection, which has shown how ---by having the detail of doing things well--- our young people can get excited about thought. If I were Minister of Culture, I would make Orella and Plana travel to every institute in the country and, of the thousands of students who would listen to the most beautiful rant Plato wrote, perhaps we would get dozens of writers and a couple of philosophers. This will not happen, not only because I will never be in charge, but because most politicians in the country read nothing at all.
One of the great findings of Clàssics (I add loud applause to its director, Sira Abenoza) has been to transfer the prose of antiquity through rhapsodes, interpreters and even works of the present. This will happen next Monday at 8 p.m. at the CCCB (stop reading and buy the ticket in question, it's only twelve fucking euros) with the dramatization of Guim Valls' poem Pitó, embodied by actress Paula Blanco. If you were able to see the premiere of this show at the La Gleva theater, you will surely return and, if you missed it, you will drag tons of anger for not attending. Let's talk about the text, the third collection of poems by an author of insulting chronology (born in 1992) but of an ancient literary wisdom. Edited by Poncianes, Pitó narrates the story of the animal sacrifice that guards the oracle of Delphi in a poem that incorporates the figure of the snake with prodigious narrative richness and poetic structures.
When I learned that Paula would recite this beastly text, I thought she would simply read it from a lectern. But Blanco has put on a snake costume and memorized it from beginning to end, first incorporating its fearsome gestures on her face and then gradually landing it in the figure of a nymph-like being. From the snake, we first discover the incarnation of sin and ailment, but gradually we admire the coquettish sinuosity of a seductive animal ("I am vain, especially when I kill" / "The dusty banquet will begin and I still haven't chosen the dress"). All this Paula performs motionless in the middle of the stage, practically without an extra gesture (I would say that the director of the invention, Roger Vila, has the Albertí lesson well learned), and with some neutral Catalan that survives in Tossa de Mar that are a godsend. To see Paula again, like this, with this text. I am short of words.
The news leads us to despair. Clàssics gives us some air in the midst of this delirium we are living. Come, young people too, to see how the snake bites you and burns you with pleasure. Forever.