Josep Pla said of him that he was "a destroyer of fanatics, who represented a society of comfortable and judicious citizens on the shores of the Mediterranean." It was Santiago Rusiñol (Barcelona, 1861- Aranjuez, 1931) something like a Renaissance artist. Painter, sculptor, writer and playwright, Rusiñol represented as nobody else the culture, the cosmopolitanism and the civism of the Catalonia of those years. Els Joglars uses in Señor Ruiseñor the figure of this passionate man for gardening to perform, with irony and humor, a scathing critique of the situation created in Catalonia as a result of the process. "Rusiñol represents a world and a spirit that has not been replaced. The sensuality, the beauty and the joyful life that he embodied have disappeared.
We want to put face to face that Catalonia of Rusiñol with the one of now and to claim art as a universal fatherland against identity homelands, "says Ramon Fontserè (Torrelló, Barcelona, 1956) who directs and stars in this play, along with Juan Pablo Mazorra, Rubén Romero, Pilar Saénz, Dolors Tuneu and Xavi Vilà, this play.
After his visit to Valladolid and Zaragoza, with the theaters full, Señor Ruiseñor -this is what Rusiñol was called in Aranjuez, where he lived the last years of his life- has arrived this Wednesday at María Guerrero in Madrid, where it is represented until the 27th from January.
The subsequent tour of the show only includes, for the time being, a day of representation in Canovellas, a town in Barcelona.
"We are not vetoed, but they do not rent us," says Fontseré, paraphrasing Josep Pla again. "We have no response from theaters in Catalonia, we just find silence. We are not playing victims, but the reality is that they do not hire us.
We are willing to go anywhere, including to Waterloo [a Belgian town where Carles Puigdemont has taken refuge], "added the company's members who proclaimed:" Freedom of expression is to defend not only what you like, but what you do not like"
The thread of Señor Ruiseñor, with a very functional and plastic scenery that seeks to support the game of the actors, focuses on a gardener who has rheumatism and is transferred to a museum where he acts as a guide. The gardener falls in love with the character of Rusiñol, whose paintings hang on the walls of the collection, which faces the patronage of the center when they decide to turn the art gallery into a museum of identity.
"We had the privilege of living in a friendly and pleasant modern Catalonia," says the gardener / Rusiñol. It is not anymore? Ramon Fontserè replies: "Kindness does not exist anymore. The smile in Catalonia is a euphemism, at least in the middle of the citizenship. The tension and the social gap between friends and families is enormous ".
The actor and director is clear that all the current fanaticism in Catalonia comes from the time of Jordi Pujol, a character on which Els Joglars, a company that has turned 55 years old, played in 1995 Ubú president.
"I am from the rural world and I did not live in that cosmopolitan and open Catalonia of the seventies, where nationalism did not exist and you were not forced to say what you professed." Tarradellas, a man who came from the war, fed up with so much confrontation and blood, advocated by unity, something that began to be destroyed with the arrival of Pujol, which was helped by the PSC, which abandoned its policy against nationalism and became more convergent than the convergents themselves.
Since then, everything went to hell and delirium came. In Catalonia the past has been uprooted or distorted and in this way an invented order has been configured ".
The reasonableness and rationality that represented Rusiñol has disappeared, Fontserè reiterates, for whom the most worrying thing is that institutions and politicians do not realize the fanaticism and delirium that they have led to citizenship. He is not optimistic about the future, although he warns: Els Joglars will not cease to inquire into art, virtue, truth and beauty, with irony, humor and sarcasm.
