Spanish artist Angelica Liddell summons the spirit of Ingmar Bergman to the Cour d’honneur of the Palais des Papes with a show that reenacts the Swedish director’s funeral.
Why did you rehearse part of your show, “Dämon. El funeral de Bergman”, in Stockholm, at the Dramaten theater, which Ingmar Bergman directed?
I had to let myself be affected by this great demon that was Bergman and go to Stockholm, within its walls, to listen to his spirit. I felt extreme emotion while working at the Dramaten, walking through the corridors and dressing rooms. Like Andrei Tarkovsky, Bergman is a tutelary figure in whose shadow I grew up. Being at his home, in his theater, influenced my moods. We go to the Court of Honor to celebrate his funeral. He himself wrote the screenplay, which appears in his will. He had asked a craftsman to build him the same coffin as that of John Paul II. His burial was poor, elementary, without vanity. He hated sentimentality and did not want fine speeches.
Is it a coincidence that the piece comes after two previous shows dedicated to the death of your parents?
Since their death, I look at everything differently. I am in a time of funerals. And perhaps saying goodbye, because I have within me the temptation to disappear from the stage. Staging Bergman’s funeral is my way of understanding my terror of loss and of life, even if the need to represent death means that art is more important than anything.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers At the Avignon Festival, women take to the big stages
Add to your selections
Is the stage the place where you come to kill a part of yourself in order to better reinvent yourself?
It is the place where I can commit suicide once, twice, three times and then be continually reborn in an infinite cycle. I am suicidal without suicide. I am cowardly and fearful in life, and that forces me to be courageous and brave in the theater. The stage is the only place where I take risks. I live in madness but, behind a form of controlled dementia, there is always, for me, a reflection on art. To defend art is to go through a state of destruction and a desire for annihilation. For Tarkovsky, being faced with a total threat of extinction allows you to enter into dialogue with yourself. As for Bergman, he said that his inner demons fired battle tanks.
The only way to survive, when you live with your demons, is to get to work. We are not made for life. We are poor people who must assume their human condition. The instinct of rebellion that has driven me since I was a child will manifest itself in demon. But as the performance progresses, I will move towards compassion, that is to say towards recognition and acceptance of this failed act that is human beings. The stands of the Court which embody the world show me this path of compassion. No doubt I have within me something of the order of repentance, the desire to be forgiven, the desire to die in peace. Sometimes I imagine that I am playing and someone shoots and kills me. But I don’t want to die on stage. I would rather die in my bed.
You have 10% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
