“The Moon has advanced in the firmament, the stars do not look like. Joe Strummer gives one last shovel to the hole in which he is digging” … we are already in the third scene and something tells us that the leader of The Clash will take more From what he had foreseen to find the mortal remains of Federico García Lorca, among the Granada municipalities of Víznar and Alfacar. It happened in August 1985. Joe Strummer came from “cut the shit” from The Clash after almost a decade. The self-proclaimed “Lord of the Punk Rock War” walked through our lands at the wheel of a Dodge and listening to my car from Manolo Escóbar. In the existential crisis, he wanted to redeem himself by finding the bones of the poet, assisted to the peak and the shovel by his friend Jesús Arias, musician and journalist: “Why have not the people of Spain have already been excavating with nails and teeth. From this place?”. The verified story of that hallucinogenous search dropped him one day Antonio Arias, brother of Jesus and leader of Lizard Nick, in the Carmona Angel Program in Radio3. The theatrical author Juan Alberto Salvatierra (Algeciras, 1978) was speechless listening to him and did not stop thinking about something else for days: “The story became an authentic obsession.” This must be told “, I said. With all the rigor Biographical, but leaving a space of creative freedom. Go to know what happened there … ” What may have happened that brown night ended up setting up in exciting monologue of Lorquian references, the Joe Strummer promenade, awarded in 2019 with the Anne Caro Teatro Award and newly published in Antigone Editions. The place chosen for its world premiere could not be another that the Londoner Cervantes Theater, the space created by Jorge de Juan and Paula Paz, about to celebrate its fifth anniversary. The goblin of Lorca has always been hanging around the magic scene under the arches of Southwark, where they have been seen in Spanish and English wedding, the house of Bernarda Alba and Yerma. But in this case, London’s call was more justified than ever, and the work is titled Joe Strummer Takes to Walk, translated by Robert Bradley with an irresistible local accent: “I invented the punk, I was me Whoever invented him, and then I shit on him when I got bored “…” The work needed to be seen here and in English, “recognized Juan Alberto Salvatierra, who was shot from the spectators at the opening night. “I wrote it in Spanish, in a very close place where the facts occurred, in the rural Granada. I had to imagine what Joe Strummer would be like talking Spanish, but the most natural thing is to hear it here and now, in his language and in London. That gives you a new perspective and I think it brings it to the viewer. ”
Salvatierra has been unfolded these days (comes from presenting these days under village in the Festival Festival) to go to the London Calling claim, Should I Stay or Should I go and, of course, Spanish Bombs … “It was the first song From The Clash that I heard and is the first musical reference in the work. In it is very well reflected by Joe Strummer’s fixation by Andalusia and by Lorca. He saw the house of Bernarda Alba in 1976 and was very impacted. It was a voracious reader And it was soaked with his poetry. ” Joe Strummer had a Spanish girlfriend and Punkie, Paloma / Palmolive, who played in the The Slits group and met Andalusia in Vein. In Granada he spent long seasons, he came to sponsor at 091 and left an unforgettable wake on board to the appathery car of him who gave foot to a documentary: I Need A Dodge, Joe Strummer on the Run (directed by Nick Hall). The leader of The Class died in 2002 at age 50 for a congenital cardiac disease. Interestingly, the most crazy and lorchian night of his life (in the company of also deceased Jesus Arias) had not been a simple anecdote. Juan Alberto Salvatier himself recognizes that he was the first surprised that no one would have taken literary game to the improbable “meeting” between the musician and the poet to date (possibly gained thanks to that black horse that “appears” in London and that is A tribute to the “impossible theater” of Lorca). “The public” is precisely the dream with which Jorge de Juan, director of Joe Strummer Takes to Walk, aspires to culminate the Lorchian trajectory of the Cervantes Theater at the departure of the pandemic. “I have tried to transmit my passion for Lorca to all the spectators and all the students who have gone through the theater,” confesses Jorge de Juan. “I have decided that Federico’s voice accompanies me until I managed to find him, wherever he is, and thank him for everything he has given me.” The Prote of the Spanish Theater in London was closed during the year and a half by the pandemic and is now when it begins to raise the flight and make its particular London Calling so that the spectators return to the warmth of the courtyard of armchairs. The dramatized and retransmitted readings online – as that of Joe Stummer Takes to Walk who attracted more than 1,000 spectators throughout the world – kept the Loving Flame during the months of cultural “cerrojazazo”. The help of the British government and Spanish culture action have allowed us to continue here, but Jorge de Juan recognizes that they are waiting to be able to sit “with the Spanish government to find a formula” that allows them to face the future in the middle and long term”. “The other day a person from the French embassy told me that if this space was French, someone would have come from the government to ask how they could help us and collaborate,” says the co-founder of the Cervantes Theater. “I hope that the Spanish government will realize the possibilities that a space like this can offer in London, I am optimistic, I think we are at the gates of a cultural rebirth and that our theater can contribute its grain of sand.”
(Joe Strummer Takes to Walk premiered on September 21 and will be on the poster at the TEATRE CERVANTS of LONDON 229 Union Streeet, until October 16, at 7:30 p.m. from Tuesday to Saturday).
