Angélica Liddell was born in Figueres and lived there for seven years. His father, Anastasio González, was a career military man. and was stationed at the San Climent Sescebes base. Perhaps these origins have to do with his disposition. But no one knows her as González, but by her stage name, taken from the adventures of Alicia (Liddell, the girl was called) in Wonderland.
The playwright, poet, actress (and a few other things) affirms that the most intense relationship she had with the capital of Alt Empordà is that it was baptized in the same font as Salvador Dalí. “Something must have happened that day.” As if a kind of artistic aura was transmitted. In fact, She relates it to the fact that Dalí scarified himself and that she has also done it a lot of times. “It is nothing pathological, but a mixture of personal experience and aesthetic choice.” I must clarify that scarifying (or scarifying, to be more precise) consists of make small incisions in the skin with a blade or a scalpel and which also means making furrows in the earth that later help to till it. Angélica Liddell, in several of her extreme shows, has practiced this self-harm, but in the last production, ‘Voodoo (3318) Blixen’, premiered in the Estación Alta and will be performed soon in Madrid, has opted for what we could call a conceptual scarification, metaphorical. That is to say, it has been opened wide, not literally, but with high doses of intimate paina cry that comes from the depths and that tells us about love, mercy and death.
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Liddell, who has been criticized, praised, admired and idolized, and also rejected and despised, must now be the Spanish creator with the greatest international projection. And not only because of artistic executions that have been described as “wild mysticism” or “work to the point of exasperation”, but because it is capable of converting betrayal, abandonment, the most intense and personal grief, into a collective rite, a “aesthetic sacrifice” that draws on classical sources.
Aristotle, in his ‘Poetics’, said that the poet must ensure that the spectator of the tragedy experiences empathy and compassion for the character’s suffering and also terror for his experience. These elements, combined, lead to catharsis, purification. This is how the Greeks experienced the spectacle. “Develop a ceremony – says Liddell – that allows you to transform the incurable into something beautiful.” Incisions in the earth, grooves in the skin. The thrill of what is both terrible and fruitful.