My relationship with the stage is very free. I am a writer, but I never know if what I write is poetry, theater, narration or all of them at once. Words are very important to me, both in their content as well as their form. I consider the word to be the material that relates to other substances; substances that we don’t usually understand as materials, but which are: time, music in all its broadness, sound, a footstep, the tapping of a finger on hollow wood, the smallest sound, the voice in all its diversity. I think of what I write as a textual score.
Antonio Fernández Lera (Madrid, 1952) is an author, translator, editor, journalist, and stage director. He has been the director of the daily newspaper Odiel de Huelva (1983-84), editor of the theater magazine El Público (1984-1990), and editor of the magazines Fases (1990-92) and Contextos (1992). In addition to his activities as an author and stage director, he has translated texts by William Shakespeare (King Lear), W.H. Auden (The Sea and the Mirror), Stephen Berkoff (Messiah), Edward P. Jones (The Known World), and Sarah Kane (Phaedra’s Love), as well as essays by André Lepecki, Laurence Louppe, Olivier Lugon, Jacques Rancière, Serge Tisseron and Jeff Wall, among many others. He is the publisher and editor of Pliegos de Teatro y Danza (collection of books currently including 57 titles related with Spanish contemporary theatre and dance).
Theatre works
Since 1998, he directs his stage pieces with Magrinyana.
2012 / Conversación en rojo; published in Pliegos de Teatro y Danza 45 (2012).
2012 / Vida y materia; published in Cuadernos de Niebla 2 (2012).
2010 / Desde la sombra/Bufones y payasos; published in Pliegos de Teatro y Danza 40 (2011).
2008 / Memoria del jardín; published in Pliegos de Teatro y Danza 14 (2005).
2005 / Libro de alegrías y Teorías de animales; poems in the dance spectacle Silencio, by Elena Córdoba, 2005; published in Pliegos de Teatro y Danza 16 (2005).
2004 / Las islas del tiempo; ed. Pliegos de Teatro y Danza 8 (2005); digital publication by www.caoseditorial.com (2003); French translation Les Solitaires Intempestives (2006).
2002 / Mátame, abrázame; published in Pliegos de Teatro y Danza 6 (2005).
2000 / Monos locos y otras crónicas; published in VIII Muestra de Teatro Español de Autores Contemporáneos (2000); digital publication in Spanish and English, www.caoseditorial.com (2011).
1998 / Plomo caliente; published in VIII Muestra de Teatro Español de Autores Contemporáneos (2000); ed. digital www.caoseditorial.com; French translation Les Solitaires Intempestives)
1994 / Dónde está la noche; (fragments from Memory of the Garden, Hot Lead, and the Book of Macbeth, directed by Esteve Graset, 1994).
1994 / Escena para cien pies de fotos/Muerte de Ayax/No somos el viento.
1992 / Casa sola.
1991 / Paisajes y voz; first staged: Teatro Pradillo; texto incluido in Pliegos de Teatro y Danza 6 (2005).
1990 / Los hombres de piedra; first staged: Teatro Pradillo; ed. Cuadernos de Teatro Contemporáneo, Teatro Pradillo (1990).
1989 / Proyecto Van Gogh: Entre los paisajes; first staged: Cambaleo.
1987 / Carambola; first staged: Espacio Cero.
1985 / Delante del muro; first staged: Espacio Cero.
He has also published: Cuadros escritos (Cuadernos de Cántiga, 1983); Cuentos melancólicos (Cuadernos de Cántiga, 1990); Los ojos paralelos (Cuadernos de Cántiga, 1992), Las huellas del agua (Trea, 2007).
– Desde la sombra/Bufones y payasos –
Synopsis: “A woman, a man. Voices. Her voice (but, is it certain that she is who is talking?) is the voice of a poet. The voice of poetry. His voice (but is it always he who speaks?) is the voice of he who never listens, who imposes silence. The silence of the poem. She is, perhaps, Ana Akhmatova. Her name invokes a time, a place. The time when movies learned to space. The place where the revolution disguised itself as a jail cell (and was never again revolution). Who but a poet could challenge silence’s rule? Who but a poet to find the voice with which to obtain victory over the sielnce?” (Quote by the author Miguel Vázquez Freire, translator of Desde la sombra/Bufones y payasos into Galician). –
Extracts from Desde la sombra/Bufones y payasos
– It is night again. The lights trick us. We close our eyes. Images of other times, between the smoke of corpses and the fumes of beer. Drunken jailors. Damned times.
– No one wants to know anything. You say it and you know it’s not true.
– Every sentence a work. Every sentence an instant. You want to create the world in an instant. A different world at every instant.
– The slaves close their fists.
– You want to destroy everything in an instant.
– You don’t know what you want You’re a fucking teenager A worm A brain dead A Slave A fucking slave
– Every person is an island.
– Hell no.
– We are an archipelago of outcasts.
– We’ve created the music the pleasure of flesh the look the caress the silence the thought the complicity the recognition desire.
– The exaltation of pain The wheel The gunpowder The door The basement The skyscraper The nuclear submarine The machine gun The knife The carnival The heaven of plastic and garbage The abyss of closed eyes
…
– The main thing is desire. The effort, the effort.
– Old books and food leftovers.
– Dirty clothes and the prejudices of a lifetime.
– At last a future for all mankind.
