Why, thirty years after the creation of El triste que nunca os vido, did you want to return to the story of Juana I de Castilla?
La Ribot: In 1992, El triste que nunco os vido was a spontaneous and feminist gesture, a response to the Spanish commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Colombus’s landing in America: that year, an entire fleet of male artists was programmed in Spain and elsewhere, without any woman being honoured. I thought of Joanna of Castile (1479-1555), a queen Spanish History has relegated to madness, accused of insanity: first by her husband, Philip of Habsburg, who wanted power, then by her father, Ferdinand of Aragon, and finally by her son, the emperor Charles V. Juana was heiress to the Catholic Monarchs, who expanded Europe by leading the first colonial expeditions and emptied Aragon and Castile of part of their population by expelling and persecuting the Arab, Jewish, and Romani populations. It’s a time marked by many scientific discoveries and other paradigm shifts: understanding that the Earth is round, that it revolves around the Sun…
What role did Joanna of Castile play in History?
La Ribot: Joanna of Castile was a political puppet. She married Philip of Habsburg to insert herself into a network of political alliances, which allowed Spain to establish its famous “empire on which the sun never sets.” When her husband died, her son Charles V had her confined to the Tordesillas convent, which she would never leave. Her story is the tragic fate of a woman sacrificed on the altar of the political interest of men—the three men in her life!
In what way is this show different from the previous one?
La Ribot: In El triste que nunco os vido, I focused on the notions of control and surveillance. With Juana ficción, the visual and sonic dimension is more important; I pay particularly close attention to the lighting, which is solely solar. In both cases, the patriarchy is seen as a force of control, erasure, and oblivion at work throughout History.
Did something in particular make you want to return to this character?
La Ribot: I hadn’t thought of returning to this character until I met Asier Puga, who one day brought me the Cancionero de Juana, a collection of songs given to Joana of Castile and Philip of Habsburg at their wedding. From there, the desire to revisit this part of history from a musical and vocal perspective was born. Entrusting the music to composer Iñaki Estrada and conductor Asier Puga allowed me work on the ephemeral character of live music, dance, and a summer day until sunset.
Asier Puga, how did you meet La Ribot and discovered her work?
Asier Puga: I’ve been aware of her work for a long time. As a conductor and programmer, I have always admired her approach to dance. La Ribot explores a path, a space that goes beyond artistic restrictions: she creates extremely suggestive tensions between disciplines. I didn’t know El triste que nunca os vido and it is purely by chance that I introduced her to the Cancionero de Juana, which was part of a corpus I was working on at the time.
Contemporary composer Iñaki Estrada composed and arranged a large part of the music of the show, which also includes an electronic creation by Álvaro Martín. The musical and vocal corpus is very diverse…
Asier Puga: The ensemble I direct—the Chamber Orchestra of the Zaragoza Auditorium – Grupo Enigma—does not specialise in ancient or medieval music. Therefore, we consulted musicologist Alberto Cebolla: we were curious to know what Joanna of Castile might have listened to. It is important to know that she was very erudite and well-informed about the musical and literary movements of her time. From these rich archives, we selected emblematic moments that resonate with her story. The real challenge was to find a composer with the sensitivity needed to conceive of a score where dance does not merely accompany the music and the music does not merely illustrate the dance. Iñaki Estrada was the right person to unite all these materials. He’s a real artisan. He wrote this score using quotations filtered through his inner world. As for Álvaro Martín, he created an electronic soundscape, close sometimes to trance. Just as Joanna of Castile was open to all the novelties of her time, we wanted to introduced this kind of atmosphere in order to create a strong link to our own time. Sometimes, ancient music dominates. Sometimes, it is contemporary or electronic music’s turn. Sometimes, all those influences come together. There are several layers and levels to those soundscapes. One should not forget that, during the time of Joanna of Castile, polyphonic music was the dominant form. In the end, the voices turned out to be the key to the whole show: voices that allowed us to build a bridge between the musical present of her time and our own. Which is why we called on Zaragoza-based vocal group Schola Cantorum Paradisi Portae, which is, in my opinion, the only one capable to connect those two different worlds. The voice and music echo each other. Sometimes, the music imitates the voice and extends or repeats it, and sometimes, it’s the other way around. Each ends up playing the role of the other. The important thing was also to combine the qualities of the voice with the qualities of the instruments. There is a sort of mise en abyme.
La Ribot: … which is also true of the costumes. For this creation, Elvira Grau drew inspiration from Dutch painter Hyeronimus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. I imagined that Juana had the opportunity to see this painting during her first trip to Flanders in 1496 for her wedding. The emperor Philip II, son of Charles V and grandson of Juana, acquired it in 1568 for his alcove in the Escorial palace. Philipp II slept with that painting, which depicts the sin of luxury, among other nightmares of the time. As for the music, even if we discussed the score a lot, I have to admit I felt a little overwhelmed by this rich ensemble! In this world filled with voices and instruments, it took me several hours of listening and work to fully grasp its depth and richness. It was the atmosphere of the voices that physically touched and moved me. We put singers and musicians at the centre of the stage so that I can enter this soundscape and, with Juan Loriente, move through it.
You’ve established many parallels between our time and that of Joanna of Castile. Similarly, what would be the thread that ties El triste que nunca os vido and Juana ficción?
La Ribot: Firstly, there’s the presence of actor Juan Loriente, who was my partner over thirty years ago for El triste que nunca os vido. Those two shows offer two perspectives on how madness was used as a tool for political domination. They reveal the tensions which exist between power, gender, and social norms in early modern Spain and remind us that much work remains to be done. Today, feminist studies have embraced the figure of queen Joanna of Castile: she isn’t called the Mad anymore, she’s been given her name back. Just like with the music, there is also a mise en abyme of the bodies. I revisit the film of El triste que nunca os vido in which I sit naked on a spinning stool, with Castilian landscapes at sunset in the background. At the time, it allowed me to enter the intimacy of Joanna’s pain. In Juana ficción, this film becomes a miniature living painting we look at on our mobile phones…
In what space—be it concrete or symbolic—will you tell us this brand new story about Juana?
La Ribot: We’re performing at the Cloître des Célestins, which lends the show a particular tone. The light turning into darkness and the different levels of intensity of the wind—I’m also thinking of the mistral, so intrinsically tied to the Festival d’Avignon—are key elements of our poetics.
Interview conducted in February 2024 and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach