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Fernando Arrabal
Arrabal in 2012
Arrabal in 2012
BornFernando Arrabal Terán
(1932-08-11) August 11, 1932 (age 91)
Melilla, Spain
OccupationPlaywright, screenwriter, film director, novelist and poet
Period1950s–present
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Fernando Arrabal Terán (born August 11, 1932) is a Spanish playwright, screenwriter, film director, novelist, and poet. He was born in Melilla and settled in France in 1955. Regarding his nationality, Arrabal describes himself as "desterrado", or "half-expatriate, half-exiled".

Arrabal has directed seven full-length feature films and has published over 100 plays; 14 novels; 800 poetry collections, chapbooks, and artists' books; several essays; and his notorious "Letter to General Franco" during the dictator's lifetime. His complete plays have been published, in multiple languages, in a two-volume edition totaling over two thousand pages. The New York Times' theatre critic Mel Gussow has called Arrabal the last survivor among the "three avatars of modernism".

In 1962, Arrabal co-founded the Panic Movement with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, inspired by the god Pan. He was elected Transcendent Satrap of the Collège de Pataphysique in 1990. Forty other Transcendent Satraps have been elected over the past half-century, including Marcel Duchamp, Eugène Ionesco, Man Ray, Boris Vian, Dario Fo, Umberto Eco, and Jean Baudrillard. Arrabal spent three years as a member of André Breton's surrealist group and was a friend of Andy Warhol and Tristan Tzara.

Writer and critic Javier Villan wrote of Arrabal:

Arrabal's theatre is a wild, brutal, cacophonous, and joyously provocative world. It is a dramatic carnival in which the carcass of our 'advanced' civilizations is barbecued over the spits of a permanent revolution. He is the artistic heir of Kafka's lucidity and Jarry's humor; in his violence, Arrabal is related to Sade and Artaud. Yet he is doubtless the only writer to have pushed derision as far as he did. Deeply political and merrily playful, both revolutionary and bohemian, his work is the syndrome of our century of barbed wire and Gulags, a manner of finding a reprieve.[1]

Childhood (1932–1946)

Arrabal (Terán is his second family name) was born to Carmen Terán González and painter Fernando Arrabal Ruiz.

On July 17, 1936, when insurrections within the military were staged against the constitutional government of the Second Spanish Republic, launching the Spanish Civil War, Arrabal's father remained faithful to the Republic and was sentenced to death for mutiny. His sentence was later commuted to 30 years' imprisonment. He was transferred between prisons, from Santi Espiritu in Melilla to Monte Hacho in Ceuta, where he attempted suicide, as well as Ciudad Rodrigo and Burgos. On December 4, 1941, he was sent to the Burgos Hospital due to apparent mental disorder. Later research has found that he likely feigned mental order in order to be transferred to a lower security prison. On December 29, 1941, he escaped from the hospital in his pajamas, despite three feet of snow covering the countryside. Despite extensive research, he was never seen again.

About his father, Arrabal has written: "Without trying to compare what is incomparable, when I confront these twilight episodes (and quite often without any logical connection), I often think of that scapegoat, my father. The day on which the Uncivil War began, he was locked up by his 'compassionate companions' in the flag room of the Melilla military barracks. He was meant to think carefully, since he risked a death sentence for mutiny if he did not join them in their insurrection (alzamiento). After an hour, Lieutenant Fernando Arrabal summoned his ex-comrades – already! – to inform them that he had pondered long enough. Today, because of this precedent, must I serve as witness, example, or symbol, as he did, of the most fundamental occurrences? I, who am a mere exile. If I am taken away from my beloved numerics, everything around me leads to over-the-counter confusion and disorder. I have no wish to be a scapegoat like my father, I only ask to die while still living, whenever Pan so wishes."

In 1936, Arrabal's mother returned to Ciudad Rodrigo with her young son, Fernando, and found a job at Burgos, then-capitol of the Nationalists and headquarters of General Franco's government. Fernando was enrolled in a local Catholic school from 1937 until 1940, when the Civil War ended and he moved with his mother to Madrid.

Arrabal was awarded the national prize for gifted children in 1941. He continued his studies at Las Escuelas Pías de San Antón, a church school whose alumni have also included Victor Hugo and Jacinto Benavente y Martínez. Arrabal later studied at another distinguished Madrid school, Colegio Padres Escolapios De Getafe. He was an avid reader and was eager to experience life.

Youth and young adulthood (1936–1946)

In 1947, when his mother ordered him to attend preparatory classes for entrance to the Academia General Militar, Arrabal protested by playing hooky. She subsequently sent him to Tolosa (Gipuzkoa), where he studied business at the Escuela Teórico-Práctica de la Industria y el Comercio del Paper, in 1949. By 1950, he had begun writing several plays, which remain unpublished.

In 1951, Arrabal began working in the paper industry at La Papelera Española. He moved to Valencia and passed his bachillerato, the first non-compulsory educational option in Spain for admission to university. He later moved to Madrid and began legal studies. During these years, he frequented the cultural institution Ateneo de Madrid and heard poets from the Postismo school. He was also finishing his early play Picnic, then titled The Soldiers, and writing El triciclo, at first titled Men with a Tricycle.

In 1954, Arrabal hitchhiked to Paris to attend a performance of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children given by the touring Berliner Ensemble. Later that year, in Madrid, he met Luce Moreau, who became his wife. In 1955, he was awarded a three-month scholarship to study in Paris, during which time he lived at the Colegio de España at the Cité Universitaire. While in Paris he suffered a serious relapse of tuberculosis. He considered this disease to be a "lucky mishap" that allowed him to move permanently to his "veritable homeland, that of Kundera and Vives, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Picasso: exile." In 1976 he appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's New York film Underground and Friends.

Politics

Arrabal had been known for being anti-Francoist and anti-monarchist and interested in anarchist trends in cultural production.[2] Arrabal had a complicated relationship with Communism. He had ties with the Communist Party of Spain during his exile, but a rupture seems to have occurred in 1977 due to a conflict with his play The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria being performed in Barcelona with artists reputed to have Communist Party ties.[3]

Awards and recognition

Arrabal was among the more controversial writers of his time, and his work has been recognized internationally. Awards include the Grand Prize for Theatre of the Académie Française, the Premio Mariano de Cavia for journalism, the Nabokov Prize for novels, the Espasa Prize for essays, and the World Theater Prize.

In 2001, he was nominated for the Premio Cervantes by Nobel Prize in Literature winner Camilo José Cela and José Hierro. He was reportedly a finalist for the Nobel Prize in 2005 due to the solicitation of several institutions and individuals. On July 14, 2005, he was named to France's Légion d'honneur. In 2007, he was awarded a doctorate of letters Honoris Causa by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.

His other awards and recognition include:

Selected works

Feature-length films

Arrabal has written and directed seven feature-length films, and has been awarded the Premio Pier Paolo Pasolini for his contributions to cinema.

In 2005, a 3-disc box set of Arrabal's films was released by Cult Epics with Viva la muerte, I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse, and The Tree of Guernica.

Several of Arrabal's plays have been adapted for film, including Le grand cérémonial, directed by Pierre-Alain Jolivet; El triciclo, directed by Luis Argueta; El ladrón de sueños, directed by Arroyo; Pique-nique, directed by Louis Sénéchal; Guernica, directed by Peter Lilienthal; and Fando y Lis, directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

One critic wrote, "Viva la muerte is an absolute masterpiece, one of the most astonishing I have seen in my lifetime" (André Pieyre de Mandiargues). Another, for Rolling Stone, wrote, "Arrabal is ferociously original" (John Parrack). Amos Vogel wrote, in the Village Voice, "An audacious, paroxistic, and artistically successful work". Raymond Léopold Bruckberger wrote, for Le Monde, "I prefer Arrabal to Fellini or Ingmar Bergman... he is to cinema what Rimbaud is to poetry."

Short films

Operas

Arrabal's opera Faustbal with music by Leonardo Balada premiered at the Teatro Real de Madrid on February 13, 2009, staged by the Comediants of Barcelona. Arrabal wrote of the opera, "Faustbal is a woman who, in the third millennium, is the reincarnation of Alfred Jarry's Doctor Faustroll, a new doctor Faust who asks God and Lucifer for words and prayers so that love and charity might be unified. Nothing can satisfy the hurricane of her scientific curiosity, nor calm the storms of her desires. A genius, very beautiful, and enriched by her transports and transfigurations, she vows a torrid love for her Amazon. She leaps between galaxies while the war to end all civilization rages, and moves through space at supersonic speed. Confronting her, Margarito, supreme leader of the armed forces, dons the armor of brutal, electronic repression. He is madly in love with Faustbal under the sky's cupola. He tries to possess her through the torrent of his tower, employing the services of Mephistopheles himself. Jesús López Cobos, music director of the Teatro Real de Madrid, will conduct the world premiere, which will be sung by sopranos Ana Ibarra and María Rodríguez. The mezzo-soprano Cecilia Diaz will sing the role of the Amazon, while tenors Gerhard Siegel and Eduardo Santamaría will be the two Margaritos, bass Stefano Palatchi will perform the role of God, and baritones Tomas Tomasson and Lauri Vasar will be Mephistopheles."

Four other operas with Arrabal's librettos have been staged, and the author describes them as "always having been as complex, yet suffering from as few complexes, as did Faustbal." They are:

In October 1985, Arrabal made his debut as an opera stage director at the Opéra Royal de Belgique, where he directed Manuel de Falla's La vida breve and Enrique Granados' Goyescas. "Of course," Arrabal commented, "under my direction the onstage chorus was nude, or to be more precise, panically covered with clay."

In 1994, Chamber Made produced the opera of Arrabal'sThe Two Executioners, with libretto by Douglas Horton and music by David Chesworth. The opera ran for two seasons in Melbourne, 1994 and 1996 at the Malthouse Theatre. Australia's The Independent Monthly wrote, "Easily the most impressive and memorable piece of music theatre in 1994."

Novels

Artists' books

Arrabal has made over 700 artists' books in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Roland Topor, Julius Baltazar, Antonio Saura, Olivier O. Olivier, Maxime Godard, Jean Cortot, Jorge Camacho, Ralph Gibson, Enrico Baj, Gustavo Charif, Milan Kundera, Michel Houellebecq and others. They include:

Poetry

In 2015, some of Arrabal's poems were adapted with music by the band Seagoat Bones on their etude album Phonèmes.[6]

Plays

Arrabal has published over 100 plays in 19 volumes. His plays include, with translations noted:

Arrabal's plays were frequently produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village of Manhattan, New York City throughout the 1970s. Productions at La MaMa included:

A traveling company from La MaMa also took The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria on tour to Philadelphia,[13] Amsterdam,[14] Venezuela,[15] and Taormina[16] in 1977–1979.

For a more extensive list of productions of Arrabal's plays, see his official website.

Paintings

Essays and non-fiction

Interest in chess

Arrabal has a strong interest in chess and has attended many chess tournaments. He is close to American chess Grandmaster Gata Kamsky and advocated for Kamsky on his chess blog during Kamsky's negotiations with FIDE over a World Chess Championship match.[17]

For over thirty years, Arrabal has written a column on chess for the French weekly news magazine L'Express. His columns have included, among many others:

References

  1. ^ The Dictionary of Literatures in the French Language (Dictionnaire des littératures de langue française, Éditions Bordas).
  2. ^ Javier Villán, El Mundo May 18, 2010, Lo de Arrabal es algo muy serio.
  3. ^ "ABC (Madrid) – 13/05/1977, p. 63 – ABC.es Hemeroteca". ABC (in Spanish). Spain. Retrieved July 2, 2018.
  4. ^ BOE-A-2019-3006 Spanish Official Journal
  5. ^ Spanish Ministry of Culture
  6. ^ "Phonemes". Archived from the original on June 26, 2015. Retrieved June 26, 2015.
  7. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: The Two Executioners (1962)". Accessed July 3, 2018.
  8. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Fando and Lis (1971)". Accessed July 3, 2018.
  9. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Dos Obras de Arrabal (1972)". Accessed July 3, 2018.
  10. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, The (1976)". Accessed July 3, 2018.
  11. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, The (1977)". Accessed July 3, 2018.
  12. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Dance/Theater of Richard S. Bach (1984)". Accessed July 3, 2018.
  13. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria in Philadelphia (1977)". Accessed July 3, 2018.
  14. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria in Amsterdam (1977)". Accessed July 3, 2018.
  15. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria in Venezuela (1978)". Accessed July 3, 2018.
  16. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria in Taormina (1979)". Accessed July 3, 2018.
  17. ^ "Second Ruy Lopez Chess Festival", ChessBase News, April 13, 2008.

Further reading

Centenares de académicos y universitarios (y entre ellos el catedràtico Francisco Torres Monreal) han analizado también los últimos y más productivos años de la creatividad arrabaliana.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Fernando Arrabal.
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