La cabeza del dragón

Synopsis

The María Guerrero Theatre has become a huge puppet theatre to educate princes, where we, the public, are the princes.  A group of actors under thirty years of age, an author with a canonical repertoire, called to a duel: What is this about educating?

This is the story of a young man (one of many…) who reveals himself to the inherited plan and embarks upon a journey to find himself, the perpetual struggle between youth and the imposition of the established, of authority.  And there are friends, and there is a bar, and an impossible love, and clash with death.

A Wagnerian, cinematic and anachronistic proposal.

Director’s Note

Valle Inclán writes in The Wonderful Lamp:“when you look at your image in the magic mirror, evoke your child’s shadow. Those who know about the past know about the future.”

I was twenty-five years old when I directed my first work, it was Valle-Inclán’s The Dragon’s Head. I’m going to turn forty, and it still interests me. Behind the fairy-tale of good and bad, behind the simplicity of its form, in the farce lies a punky impulse to destroy the traditional worlds, to end the established norm.  It’s not for nothing that critics of the time said it was not appropriate for children.  The Dragon’s Head was part of the “Children’s theatre” project in Benavente, which Valle accompanied with the conviction that it was the basis of the renovation of the national theatre. Of all the Valles I could choose, I choose the most marginal one, the one who writes for whom nobody wants to write: childhood, and I propose a fairy tale for adults.

At a time of profound changes in Spanish tradition, The Dragon’s Head is an invitation to ask ourselves what tradition is, how we decide what is good or bad, who decides it and how we build new ones. Do we know about the past? How do we relate to it? Can we know about the future?

Perhaps, if we evoke our children’s shadow, we can achieve it…

Lucía Miranda