My relationship with writing stems from my deside to actualize my relationship with the stage, of the need to find the way to give meaning and direction to all the voices (my own and those of others) that inhabit me and from the desire to generate a discourse that, through them wants to invite reflection, among other things, about the architecture of the relationships that sustain the building of theater. My writing begins from something very similar to desperation, becomes method and allows me to return to artistic practice its performative capacity or its ability to create, so frequently hijacked by institutions and markets.
Claudia Faci (Lille, 1966) is a dancer, choreographer, actress, teacher, and independent author. Her first choreographic creations go back to the 1990s; during that same decade she won a scholarship for postgraduate studies in London and then received training in the Dramatic Arts. As an actress, she has worked in all kinds of dance and theater productions, as well as in film and television. In 2006, she premiered Nur Für Dich (Only for You) at the festival Madrid en Danza and since then she has focused on creation to offer a peculiar vision of the stage arts through a work that is nourished by her experience in the field of dance, theater, performance, and literature. In 2007 she began to write. She is currently the resident artist at the Teatro Pradillo (Madrid).
Theatre works
2007-2008 / Agnès, first staged: April 3, 2008, El Canto de la Cabra, Madrid.
2008 / A.n.a, August-November 2008; first staged: January 28, 2009, Festival Escena Contemporánea.
2009 / Qué sería de mi en una noche como esta si no fuera por ti?, June-August 2009, first staged: September 19, 2009, Cuartel del Conde Duque, Madrid, La Noche en Blanco.
2010 / Esto es lo que hay, January-April 2010, first staged: May 27, 2010, El Curro DT, Madrid.
2010 / You name it: June-August, first staged: 9 September 2010, L’Antic Teatre, Barcelona.
2011 / Einfach so. La Pastoral, March-April 2011; first staged: May 20, 2011, Templete de la Música of the Reitro Park, Madrid,
2012 / Construyo sobre el olvido: February-May 201; first staged: June 2012, Teatro Pradillo, Madrid; published: Pliegos de danza y teatro (2013).
– Construyo sobre el olvido –
Synopsis: This text was born from the desire to revisit a cycle of work titled Trilogy of disaster, begun at the end of 2009. The first of the three parts of that trilogy entailed an inflection on the author’s relationship with the theater which provoked the writing of two consecutive essays that complete the cycle and which make up the basis of the work presented here. In it, the author completely bares both her mental processes during a deep creative and emotional crisis as well as the structure of theater itself. This piece pays homage to other authors, integrating their voices within the body of the text. Number of characters: originally conceived for a single actor, the work includes a multiplicity of voices which dialogue and are enacted mutually so that they could be performed by at least 3 performers.
– Extracts from Construyo sobre el olvido –
Part 1: This is what there is.
[Read in person]
In the depths of the mind, like a mirror, the image of the dis-aster. In front, in close up, she herself with the sword raised ready to administer the kind of justice that ends everything without moving from her place. And floating above the scene, without knowing where nor how to apply itself, an intention of caretaking, of healing what is sick. (…) Where does memory arise from? I don’t ask about the origin of the footstep, I don’t ask about what was but instead about this consciousness that says “I” beneath the image. There is nothing present in memory save the remembering, which is creating an image like another image that in truth never existed outside of my mind. Nonetheless, I let myself be tricked, I let myself get lost in the dream of my fleeting sensations. They will pass, I know. And I step back to watch pass by a tram that runs over a woman who walks with flowers in her eyes giving out kisses as a propaganda for life. How curious: I feel two parallel cracks in my body, one at the waist, another at the neck; someone beside me whines; I realize that I walk upon a puddle of blood but I don’t see anyone wounded, there is no cadaver. Apparently. (…) [Offstage voice] The situation is as follows: [Higher pitched offstage voice] Note: It’s a bit of a mess because part of what you want with these proposals is directly related to the old desire of the “meta” artifices of breaking the fourth wall that is the pretension of realism, although in reality it’s not so much the fourth wall as the veil of impersonality or of the invisibility of the audience (named thus, in singular) that you want to pierce. On the other hand, this remembering all the time that what you are seeing is an artifice and making visible the strings that move the thing as a show of respect, always gave me the sensation that it is a farce of enormously rhetorical honesty designed to make the author appeal to you and for you to approve what they do and you feel flattered because they consider you mature enough to bear with their reminding you all the time that you’re in the middle of something artificial.
Part 2: You name it [Offstage voice] Nothing will happen today. My eyes hurt, I keep smoking, I put off until tomorrow what I promised to do last year and finally, tired and senseless, I stop suffering because my body killed off by bad writing feels so worn out that it seems innocent to me. [Deeper offstage voice] To be coherent with your intentions this should be a great piece of shit, an absolute dis-aster. The stars should fall, yes, but on your head. And burn everything. But no, because that would be rather cool as a performance, it should simply be very bad (and who’s to tell you that it isn’t) but you don’t have the ovaries to not make the effort and even I do what I can to save the failure from its own failure. Let inheritance go fuck itself! You continue being a slave to its desire: the stage commands, the audience commands, its desire commands, and one emerges and does whatever it takes in order to meet the professional commitment that, without a doubt, commands. You continue functioning in the service of an audience that increasingly fears more because the illusion of being the author of something has woven the social fabric with new threads in which you untangle yourself in such a way that you give greater importance each time to what is in play when you appear. To confuse neurosis itself with creation impedes the enjoyment of the aesthetic experience. You’ve achieved exactly the opposite of what you wanted and you’re trapped in a social being with whom you have a bad relationship, what’s more. Come on, yes, say what you’re thinking. [Offstage voice] I think that one of the reasons why I don’t commit suicide is that I couldn’t recount it. (…) [Said on stage] One would need to dig a tunnel. Dig a tunnel, yes: dig until finding the light and inventing another machine. One would need to again begin to desire. One would need to transform, by virtue of this desire, nausea into love of the world, hate into a pickax to dig the tunnel, rage into a shovel to remove the rubble, obsession into fuel to not weaken. And all this… alone!?