First blood

Winner text of the XXXI Premio SGAE Jardiel Poncela Award

Synopsis

“I do not fear ghosts. The living are terrifying only because they have bodies.” Marguerite Yourcenar.

The theatre has always been related to the cult of the dead and the figure of the revenant: the returned, reborn on stage; those who can articulate their story post mortem. Primera sangre invokes a girl who was abducted and murdered in the 1990s and whose case was dismissed without the culprit being found.

Absent and present (the dead do not respect rest), Laura interrogates the neighbours her age, the commissioner in charge of the case and an educator: Do we educate in fear? Does fear avert danger or life? Is rape culture a secret society in the light of day, as anthropologist and activist Rita Laura Segato says, and what structures of abuse do we live with today? How will men experience the coming paradigm shift? 

Halfway between memoir and documentary, thriller and ghost story, the autofiction awarded with the XXXI Premio SGAE de Teatro Jardiel Poncela forces us to reflect on the abuses of childhood that are written on women’s bodies. With lyricism (poetry as a key) and rotundity, Primera sangre invites us to recover the memory of those who are no longer with us in order to multiply our existence.

Director’s note

Laura came back to life in me 30 years after she died, when a friend from the city where I was born told me that she was pregnant with a girl. Although I started writing Primera Sangre, through dance, following this news, I always had a clear picture of Laura’s photo: the poster, MISSING. I was the same age as her, the missing (later murdered) girl, and I was learning to distinguish the known from the unknown and fear from daring, like green from red. Throughout my adolescence I swung between these poles, until I made what Hölderlin calls the sublime very much my own: “But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” 

It is a lie that girls are raised equally: not being able to walk freely in the evenings, not being able to trust the kindness of strangers… There’s nothing in the world like a pair of red shoes!This is said in the story where red shoes make the anti-heroine dance through forests and fields, relentlessly. Luckily, in spite of our fear, or perhaps in order to face it, as teenagers we put on red shoes.

In Primera Sangre, through dance, we offer a deferred mourning for all the minors murdered in the 1990s and for the girls who went out on the streets asking for forgiveness, with the feeling that the public space was not theirs. Text, music and dance in an exercise in hauntology (the study of absences) and necromancy (divination of the future by the dead).

María Velasco