He is an actor, playwright, translator, director. Cinema, theater, series, Raphael Spregelburd don’t believe in categories. Creator of “La stubbornness”, the greatest theatrical landmark of recent years that is part of his Hieronymus Bosch Heptalogy, these days he presents “Hell” at the Astros Theater, a work where terror falls with the force of a hammer blow. Language as an artifice, criticism, the traps of the industry and theatrical ritual in this talk with NEWS.
News: The language, which returns under different guises, as if it were a symptom in all his works. Why does it always come back there?
Raphael Spregelburd: What are my options? What else can you talk about? (laughs). I think that between us and the real world there is a membrane that is language. And our way of being in the world depends to a great extent on the success or failure that we have in the relationship with that membrane that on the one hand hides and on the other connects with reality. We don’t even choose that language, we absorb it by being in a certain culture.
News: Do artistic facts create their own language?
Spregelburd: Every work of art is a creation of forms, tensions, a language. Making a work is like inventing a new language. It has its grammar, its values, its nouns, its exceptions and its rules, and the audience that attends a play learns that language while watching it. And the curious thing about that form of language is that when the work is finished, it is useless for anything else, it is thrown away.
News: Why do you think inclusive language causes so much controversy?
Spregelburd: It seems to me that language has historically been given the appearance of a mausoleum with indications of what can and cannot be done. Lunfardo words that do not have a fixed spelling, for example, until they enter the dictionary with one form or another, are a scandal. I think some people are reassured by “scholar-ruled” language. But you and I know that nobody knows the language as much as the users and that this institution is controversial. I don’t use inclusive language, but I think it’s fantastic that it exists because it points out an injustice. What matters is the repair of that damage, if the solution is there or not, time will tell.
News: Lack of understanding is used as an excuse to ban inclusive language in schools. There are many people offended, which does not leave it to be a curious phenomenon…
Spregelburd: I can understand if they speak to me in inclusive language so I wouldn’t be offended if they used it, I believe that it should not be prohibited in schools as was done in the City of Buenos Aires because it is completely harmless. In fact, kids pick it up much faster than their teachers. I believe that what is being questioned is the supposed deformation of language, the creation of words that do not exist, and it seems to me a funny scandal, very of this time and that should not be given greater importance.
News: As a result of those unusual and fierce debates, he thought about the protagonist of his work and how virtuous one must be to save oneself in this absurd world. Hell is the other?
Spregelburd: From what we know of the play, saving oneself costs a lot (laughs). In fact, at some point they tell him: “Now I understand why no one is ever saved, everyone is in hell.” And we come to the worst, hell was eliminated by the Vatican, the Church reached an agreement according to which hell is not a real place, it is a metaphor, a way of speaking. I took that very seriously and I say, if hell is no longer in a safe place, under the burning Earth, if it is now word, it is everywhere. The terrifying effect is much more effective if the place does not exist.
News: Speaking of dogmas, do you think there is a dissolution of the critical gaze?
Spregelburd: It’s not my subject because it’s not my job, but I see that half of the reviews are written by illiterate people and it’s unfortunateSince no one asks you for a critic’s diploma, it seems to me that anyone who wants to go and give their opinion goes and does it, but it surprises me, especially in the graphic media where that look is very impoverished. For me, the ideal critique would be that of someone who uses language as a tool to get to know the world, who can think from the work. I’m not interested in a rating, not even when a critic wants to demolish a work and act funny because he destroys it, that’s not interesting. When I started doing my plays in Germany I read critics and I didn’t realize if they were for or against and the press agents of the theater told me: “It would make the critic embarrassed if you realized if they were praising or destroying it. Your task is not that, your task is to think“. They would not put stars or bugles because it would be humiliating for everyone, mainly for them. We have a more primitive system and the curious thing is that there are a lot of skillful and thoughtful critics who do not have the means to exercise that type of readingthere is a university career in Theater Criticism and its graduates are the unemployed in the area.
News: The arrival of platforms changed the way we watch, recommend and consume entertainment. Did you also modify the work system?
Spregelburd: Yes, it changed it a lot because it ended up industrializing and impersonalizing the last remaining bastion, cinema and auteur series. Imagine that if a series is no longer created for a local audience with certain interests or dialogue needs, but is made for the whole world, everything changes because it focuses on how to sell that to a global audience. Even the concept of human being is different, because he is seen as a consumer and not as a person with his own interests, that happens and it is evident. But something else happens, I, in order to do my theater, which is not very financeable because it occupies the space of independent theater, I need my work in the audiovisual medium. I have shot more movies and series than staged plays in recent years. I have to buy my own time with the money the system pays me to make those fictions.
News: And what about the public theater? Because it gives the feeling that the system is broken.
Spregelburd: This thing about a public theater showing up, telling you that you have two months of rehearsal and paying you what is paid, which is very little because it has depreciated in a horrible way, is very difficult. I would say no to a proposal like this because I prefer to be a freelancer to work on series. But not everyone has that option, it is also a privilege to be called by the industry. Today we know more than ever that to do theater we have to finance ourselves.
News: And with all that the public continues to grow almost miraculously. To what do you attribute that independent theater continues to be a space of cultural resistance?
Spregelburd: In this city, independent theater is blessed by good luck, it has an audience, interest and quality, something that does not happen in other parts of the world. In other cities, theater has become something very similar to opera, a dead genre that replicates a technique to the taste of a time that is not ours. Here there is a very young audience, it has not become something elitist like in other cities of rich countries and cultures where people go to the theater to get bored, to pay a cultural toll to see the classic that we know by heart. It doesn’t happen to us here, people who go to the theater practice a ritual, they want to meet, they want a quilombo, they want the theater to say what cannot be said in other spaces more regulated by that industrial corset.
News: You started shooting a movie with Alejandro Agresti, a director who always escaped the rules, can you tell us something?
Spregelburd: Yeah, let’s hope they don’t kick me out for this (laughs). It is a spectacular script with only two protagonists that we are going to do with Eleonora Wexler. We have said yes to everything she proposed to us because we are very involved in the project, it is called “What we wanted to be”.
News: What is it about? Difficult question being Agresti.
Spregelburd: He always has that ability to combine the intellectual with the emotional. It’s about a couple who meet leaving a film club, they start chatting about the film and one might think they’re going to have a vibe until the woman proposes to him that they can only continue seeing each other if they lie to each other. She tells him, “I couldn’t bear to hear you tell me anything true or tell you the truth.” So they have a very long relationship where they can only talk about what is deep while lying to each other and that raises a question, is it possible to found love on lies? The exciting thing is that they reach the same result as with the truth.
