Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding is a poetic tragedy set in rural Andalusia that explores passion, fate and duty under the crushing weight of patriarchy and tradition. This is the story of a wedding, the two women at the centre of it, the Bride and the Mother of the Groom and their respective struggle with or adherence to the misogynistic society they belong to.
When the bride disobeys the unwritten rules, the villagers' rage tacitly calls upon the Moon and Death who, like mid-wives, accompany the Lover and the Groom to their inescapable deaths. Through its blend of realism, lyricism, and folklore, Blood Wedding exposes the conflict between individual and society, the weight and appeal of tradition, and how patriarchy persists championed and furthered by its victims, women.
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It has been a privilege to come back to IAB and dig into the world of Lorca. The company of 9 and myself have been wrestling with the Spanish canon, making sense of the intertwining prose, verse, songs, realism and symbolism and finding its resonance today.
This is a play about forbidden desire, tradition and vengeance and there are many examples of these. But this one focuses on women: as victims and oppressors, as the endless source of life and death. With the Land, the Moon and Death which all happen to be female joining in too.
I see Lorca as an accidental feminist - it was not his agenda when writing the rural trilogy (Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba) but the screaming injustice he perceived all lay bare the scale and virulence of the established misogyny of the time. In Blood Wedding, he crucially exposes women's role in championing and enforcing the very rules that oppress them. And this ripples now. He also juxtaposes this social violence with symbolic, pagan, female ineluctable forces, somehow rebalancing power at the scale of the universe. Showing us the immensity and complexity of the problem.
So, we have -like Lorca -not been afraid of juxtaposition and have played with anachronism, with realism and absurdism. We have looked at contemporary rural Andalusia and embraced the omnipresent white plastic chair and the plastic sheets of Almeria. We have sided traditional songs with disco remixes and hopefully created a stage language that talks about Spain, its profound attachment to the land and traditions, and its paradoxical fiery rebellion against it.
The show will be performed the following dates:
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