Company

Choreography: Luisillo
Music: Federico Moreno Torroba (original)
Costume Design: Roberto Carpio
Set Design: Rafael Carrasco
Libretto: Luisillo, based on the homonymous novel by Miguel de Cervantes (preexistent)
Stage Director: Luisillo
Lighting Design: Antonio

First episode: The Windmills

The windmills... Don Quixote’s eternal hallucination, the eternal distortion of vision that leads him to mistake the innocent sails of the windmills for the Herculean arms of giants. What matters is the intention that drives him. For fighting windmills is a small thing, but fighting giants is heroic. Don Quixote, however, does not hesitate. The episode recounts this strange adventure in which Don Quixote, as in all his adventures, emerges bruised and battered, his bones broken, but his spirit intact and victorious.

Second episode: The Galley Slaves

The episode of the galley slaves has universally been regarded as a parable of human ingratitude. Don Quixote cannot accept that the prisoners are being sent to the galleys against their will and sets them free. He has spared them years and years of labour and hardship, and the galley slaves repay him by stoning him.

“I have always heard it said, Sancho, that doing good to villains is like pouring water into the sea.”

Don Quixote already knew this, yet despite that, he tried to do good to the galley slaves. The bitter experience will not teach him caution: “You are a poor Christian, Sancho, for you never forget an injury once it has been done to you,” Don Quixote tells Sancho. Don Quixote knew how to forget them all.

Third episode: The Inn

Don Quixote must be saved. Saved? Perhaps that is the wrong word. To bring him from the world of dreams in which he lives back into the prosaic, everyday world of reality.

No conspiracy could have been better intentioned than that devised by the priest and the barber to imprison Don Quixote in the cage on the ox cart. A useless conspiracy, it must be said, because Don Quixote will escape being saved — or lost — and will continue as before, in his imagined world, from which he will emerge only one day, not to live, but to die.

Fourth episode: Encounter with the Inn Maid Transformed into Dulcinea

What does Dulcinea’s face look like? It is the sum of every perfection. But Dulcinea does not exist; she is a creation of Don Quixote’s mind, and the maid whom he claims to be Dulcinea has a round, flat face.

Don Quixote notices these flaws, but believes that wicked enchanters have clouded his eyes with mists and cataracts so that he sees her as she is not. Even so, Don Quixote suffers no disappointment and continues to make Dulcinea the queen and mistress of his thoughts.

Fifth episode: Altisidora

“Must I be so unfortunate that there is no maiden who looks upon me without falling in love with me?” says Don Quixote. “Must the peerless Dulcinea be so ill-fated that she cannot be left alone to enjoy my constancy?”

“What do you want of her, queens? Why do you pursue her, empresses? Why do you harass her, maidens of fourteen and fifteen years of age?”

The farce of Altisidora pretending to be in love with Don Quixote is one of the most suggestive episodes.

“I can clearly see, Sancho, that I am not handsome, but I also know that I am not deformed, and it is enough for an honourable man not to be a monster in order to be well loved, provided he possesses the qualities of the soul that I have told you about.”

It is upon all these arguments that Don Quixote bases his belief in the passion he has awakened in Altisidora’s heart.

Sixth episode: The Defeat

Adventures and misadventures... This is the greatest of all Don Quixote’s defeats, the one that caused him the deepest sorrow of all those he had suffered until then.

One morning on the beach in Barcelona, he saw a fully armed knight approaching him, who challenged him to single combat in order to force him to admit that his lady was more beautiful than Dulcinea.

“If I defeat you,” the knight told him — and he was none other than his friend, the bachelor Sansón Carrasco — “I want you to retire to your home for the space of one year.”

It was a ruse intended to remove Don Quixote from the dangers brought about by his madness. Don Quixote was defeated and prepared to honour his promise.

Epilogue: The Death of Don Quixote

Before that period had elapsed, death put an end to him once and for all.