Roberto Fratini: “In Afanador, the game of metamorphoses is more devilish than ever”

Afanador is based on the photographic work of Ruven Afanador. What was the research process like? Does having this source of inspiration change things significantly compared with others?

It was essentially a matter of moving through Afanador’s imagery like a labyrinth, especially the photographic series devoted to the flamenco universe, such as Ángel Gitano and Mil Besos; of finding a form of aberrant coherence, of dreamlike continuity — fatal rather than causal — between the images; and of preventing this journey from becoming a consequential “narrative”.

We strongly believed in the analogy between the act of photographing and the concept of a “spontaneous” blossoming of the image: as if the real fact — documentary, folkloric or costumbrista — suddenly, in the photographer’s eye, bloomed with all its implicit exaggerations, paradoxes and emphases. And we wanted these Iberian fleurs du mal to call to one another according to dreamlike logics.

Working with a photographic source, and sometimes a “brutally” photographic one — in Afanador’s work there is an eloquence that defies discourse and approaches mystery — means, on the one hand, reconstructing the physical and visual gestures that shape a world; and, on the other, reflecting on the meaning of the gesture of photographing itself: on the role played by vision, or visionary power, in the act of making and capturing an image. Ultimately, on the fact that a desiring eye does not merely capture the object of its desire, but manufactures it, deforms it and, to a certain extent, kills it.

Therefore, it was less a matter of “bringing life” to Afanador’s photographs than of drawing out from his photographs — and from photography as a way of seeing and a way of being — its power to metamorphose life into death, and vice versa.

What surprised you most when working with Ruven Afanador’s imagery?

Afanador perhaps sensed that photography — the quintessential modern way of capturing the world of life — was traversed by an irreducible polarity: black and white; dynamic and still; living and dead. And that traditional Spanish dance, of all possible dances or aesthetics, was, with its dynamic paroxysms, its figures and its defiant poses, a world made of that same polarity: full of life, overflowing with death, invincibly haunted by a dark and sardonic Eros.

The stark black and white also gave Ruven Afanador the possibility of turning hair into waterfalls, batas de cola into avalanches, headdresses into hurricanes, fans into jet-black suns, and bodies into dark puddles, infernal ideograms and stumbling blocks of dark matter. Afanador wrote his somewhat toxic declaration of love to Spain by observing what was cooking, fermenting or rotting in the phantasmagorical garden of the Andalusian imagination.

Ruven’s work creates a very distinctive universe. What are the characters we can find in Afanador like?

Although the piece includes some of the “technological fetishes” most commonly associated with the craft of photography, it does not show a real photographic studio. In real circumstances, the studio would be the place where the diaphragm separating fiction, the set, from reality — the “pose” from spontaneity — is constantly being constructed, dismantled and reconstructed.

In the dreamlike circumstances of the piece we are creating, the photographic studio is that “space of delirium” from which, like a bad dream, there is no possible escape. No one here, not even those manipulating the technical frame, manages to remain “outside the frame”: everyone and everything here is hostage to photography as a pattern of experience and vision in which one is constantly threatened by stillness; in which one is “posing” all the time; in which even the technical elements — lights, panels, devices, artefacts and so on — are monsters posing.

If there is “drama” here, it lies entirely in the journey of a group of bodies struggling between the vital law of dance and the deathly powers of photography. There are also other bodies, or “other” bodies, in which morphology has managed to impose itself on life — this is Afanador’s teratology. These image-bodies visit Afanador’s universe as messengers of death, emissaries of complete stillness, paradisiacal birds of ill omen. And, essentially, they do nothing but fixedly be the image they are.

What did you want to convey with Afanador? Is there any aspect of his gaze that stands out?

Afanador’s world is literally “luciferian” — Lucifer means this: the “illuminator”. And Ruven Afanador’s gypsy angels are all black angels, exterminating angels or fauns. I believe the originality of his approach lay in entering, through his gaze, into the folds of a world without wishing either to document it, monumentalize it or turn it into a museum piece.

Constantly betrayed by his eye, which is a desiring eye, Afanador is the opposite of a “neutral” reporter or a “conservator” of culture. I think he sensed that the only way to represent the vitality of the flamenco and Andalusian universe was to account for that universe’s capacity to reimagine itself constantly, and in turn to reimagine it, just as we reimagine the world when we dream of it.

What has been the most complicated part of the process? And the most satisfying?

The most complicated part has been subjecting the physical, visual and dynamic universe of a “specialized” company such as the Ballet Nacional de España to the same kind of anamorphosis, the same game of emphasis, displacement and recontextualization — the same détournement — to which Afanador’s gaze subjected the subjects of his photography. And doing so, like him, without denaturing the style, but allowing it to reveal something of itself: a dynamic subconscious of Spanish dance.

The most satisfying part has been witnessing the extraordinary generosity of the entire company in exploring this dark, surprising and at times dissident side of the choreographic imagination; in turning tradition and convention on their heads again and again, starting from an impeccable mastery of tradition itself.

You have worked previously with La Veronal. What is it like to collaborate with Marcos Morau?

I have accompanied Marcos in many creations for La Veronal and for other companies over the last 12 years. Collaborating with Marcos Morau means following the thread of Ariadne through certain powerful and insistent images, in order to discover at every moment, beyond programs and intentions, what “primitive illness”, what semantic obsession allows them to coexist in a kind of ecosystem of meaning.

And it means helping an entire landscape — the final show — emerge from that ecosystem of meaning, a landscape that is both absurd and mysteriously coherent. Marcos has helped me a great deal to discover that the task of dramaturgy is not, as is often believed, to offer the ultimately miserable guarantees of meaning, but to give the shiver of nonsense, brushing against it at every moment.

How is Afanador different from other productions you have worked on?

Here, the game of metamorphoses is more devilish than ever. Here, the part of afán — eagerness or striving — in the title enters powerfully into the rhythm of events. And I sometimes feel that the difficulty of dealing with the theatrical format is very similar to the difficulty Afanador had to overcome in dealing with the “orthogonal karma” of photography, which, whether one likes it or not, is always the same damned rectangle of image.

He sought a thousand ways to escape this kind of iconic coffin: his photographs overflow with foreshortenings, slants, oblique planes, deceptive slopes and vertiginous perspectives. Vertigo, here, imbalance, is the most substantial challenge.

What are we going to find in Afanador?

A loving blasphemy; a holy witches’ sabbath of images that vibrate, scatter, disperse and finally disappear, only to transform into more images. A thousand kisses.