Fundamentalmente fantasías para la resistencia

Synopsis

KYIV, March 2022. Patricia is a writer and theatre director who has transformed her company’s rehearsal room into a shelter. Despite the Russian invasion, she continues writing stories to keep her loved ones together, and distance her daughter Olena from the defence committees.  The director proposes writing a piece entitled Pin, Pan, Putin. The war makes rehearsals a complex affair, but the company manages to make progress on their story. However, from the moment Putin’s character dies, everything turns into absolute chaos.

Writer and director’s note

On 24 February, as Putin was sending tanks to attack Ukraine, we were having our usual rehearsal for El Golem. It was as though our allusions to the war came from that same afternoon. Lamentably, war is part of humanity’s everyday life.

When the invasion began I was writing a different story, but the shock of it sent me into paralysis. But the title remained, and it became my refuge: Fundamentalmente fantasías (Fundamentally fantasies). The title served as a refuge for me because humour is the best tool I know of to fight against violence; whilst fantasy is an essential part of being able to escape and understand our reality.

We need to create fiction to do this. These stories become laboratories of the possible and impossible, of facts and prejudices, of metaphors and our harsh reality. When we say truth is stranger than fiction, we are showing our awe by comparison. We ask a lot of fiction. We ask it to outdo reality, through plot twists, characters and possibilities. We ask our human imagination to be greater than the imagination of that which reality belongs to – the gods.

The end of the title (para la resistencia), came when I added the desire to write, connecting the emotions war brought about in me, to Fundamentalmente fantasías and this included not leaving out the tragedy. The work entails a battle between comedy and tragedy that expresses endless sorrow in the face of evil and destruction, and also the vindication of innocence. Sometimes I think that when I work in theatre I become a caver, going deeper into the caves of my heart in search of a scrap of innocence.

The meaning of Fundamentalmente fantasías para la resistencia came into sharp focus when I met Anabell Sotelo of ProEnglish Theatre Kiev, in Madrid. When I read the beginning of the work to her and got her blessing, it diluted the shame and fear of getting involved in something nobody had asked me to, and I launched into the fantasy to find spaces of freedom and strength as a form of resistance.

Alfredo Sanzol