★★★ The story of Herculine Barbin is heartbreaking and haunting. Her hermaphroditism (she had male and female sexual organs at the same time) never allowed her to understand what she was or to choose what she wanted to be. Having been educated as a woman all her life, at the age of twenty-one she was classified as a supernatural monster and a court order ordered her to assume the status of a man. It was the middle of the nineteenth century: prejudice and rejection plunged the now renamed Abel Barbin into anguish, who in 1868 decided to commit suicide by inhaling gas in his apartment in Paris, where he lived in poverty. Previously, he had documented his life and his suffering in his ‘Memoirs’, protected by the doctor who performed the autopsy and discovered in the 1970s by the philosopher Michel Foucault, author of ‘History of sexuality’, who published them in 1978. .
Obviously, in the middle of the twenty-first century and with the vindication of gender policies in full swing, the issue acquired a new significance, far removed from the oppressive original treatment. Along these lines and within the framework of the 2020 Buenos Aires International Festival (FIBA), Argentine director Alfredo Arias premiered ‘Hermaphrodite’, a work freely inspired by Barbin’s memoirs. The case also gave rise to the opera ‘Alexina B’ by the composer Raquel García-Tomás, presented at the Liceu Theater in Barcelona last March.
Arias entrusts the narration of Barbin’s life to two ‘lecturers’, a man and a woman, who alternate the story in the first and third person: a dispassionate story that limits itself to reporting on the concealment and social condemnation, the role of religion and Herculine’s personal suffering. This report-like exposition, added to the lack of surprise at the end, make ‘Hermaphrodite’ a work in which the depth of the original theme far exceeds its theatrical translation.
Mayra Bonard and Carlos Casella, authors of the choreographic scheme, successfully take on the challenge of speaking uninterruptedly while they dance, and manage to embody the ambiguity of the story. A successful game of lighting and shadows enhances the symbiosis between the two characters, and from the sound the Debussy faun is used, a symbol of eroticism and lasciviousness, but also electronic music, in this partially successful attempt to bring this true story to the present. happened a century and a half ago,
