The Undertaker of Paterna, an encounter with the conflicting past through theater and literature
Are theater and literature suitable means to disseminate historical memory, those facts of the past that still challenge us and that we need to know in order to tackle an increasingly turbulent present and future?
We can verify this by watching the theatrical monologue L’enterrador, by Gerard Vázquez and Pepe Zapata, and the graphic novel El abismo del olvido, by Paco Roca and Rodrigo Terrasa, both proposals based on the real biography of Leoncio Badía Navarro,’ the undertaker of Paterna’, a retaliatory republican who can only find work in the cemetery of his town. His reflections and dilemmas around war conflicts, human behavior in borderline situations and how to face the conflictual past, the result of a hard experience of our own, will help us assess how we relate to those events in our history that we still drag, like the hundreds of graves that remain to be opened, the thousands of disappeared or the need for restorative justice, after more than 80 years after the end of the Civil War. Our Undertaker, like Antigone, will perform.
Would we be able to do it? Is it necessary to preserve the memory of these events? Need to remember or better forget? Bury or dig up? How and when? Can theater and literature, like history, be magistra vitae (teacher of life)? Perhaps with ‘L’enterador de Paterna’ we will find some answer.
Schedule:
19:00 – Conversation led by Víctor Amela, with Paco Roca and Rodrigo Terrassa, authors of El Abismo del Olvido and Gerard Vázquez and Pepe Zapata, authors of L’Enterrador
20:00 – Dramatized reading