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filiberto y sofia

Filiberto y Sofía: Metahistoria de amor multidimensional (2019). Filiberto & Sofía: A multidimensional love meta-story. Winner of the FER (Literary Fund of Río Negro) Award, Category Dramaturgy. Viedma: Fondo Editorial Rionegrino.

EXCERPT (Monologue by The Presenter):

“My beloved and never fairly valued audience, how arduous is the art of the spectator! Remaining like that, in tense and expectant stillness, in an unfailingly uncomfortable chair, for endless hours, stiff in obedient immobility, anchored to a device that has provided the basic layout of various instruments of torture and execution. That device whose contours are embedded like the fingers of a sadistic masseuse in the lumbar area and whose base flattens the buttocks, chronically deforming them and causing an uncomfortable itch that spreads down the spine to squeeze the shoulder blades and numb the brain itself. Thus, the devoted spectator exercises his dark and misunderstood art, an art that has never been systematically studied. An art, moreover, that has been flatly ignored by historians of arts and techniques. A knowledge that consists of the disciplined suppression of the body and its constituent biology, which encompasses even the organic urgencies most essential to subsistence. Under the appearance of extreme concentration of this heroic artist, beneath the very thin veil of the civilizational shell, unnameable animal drives stir. Thus the artist refrains from immobility, the magician from listening, the master from stark observation, the ultimate judge in whose hands rests the destiny of every playwright, actor, director, etc…. Oh, the implacable power of the spectator, oh his rapacious judgment, his deadly eye. Thus this artist of artists renounces the discharge of his most desired carnal desires, thus with utmost mastery he denies his violent instinct of domination over his neighbor sitting next to him. That fellow artist, so close and distant at the same time, who suspects absolutely nothing of the sinister designs that are woven in the brain basements of the person sitting next to him. But who, in turn, is no innocent and also barely tamps down the desire to materialize his most obscene and violent impulses on the spectator sitting on the other side, and so on until completing a beautiful circle in tense balance, a perfect self-contained order and on the verge of imploding into bloody chaos. (Pause) How little the art of the spectator is valued, what poor pay, what terrible working and health conditions! And how little this sublimated creator is aware of the power he carries in his hands, in his eyes, in his capricious and unfounded judgment! (Pause, MUSIC is heard). For our part, we can only reward you in this miserable way, with our humble art, the art of representation. (He steps aside.) Come on! May your pains not be in vain!”