ARCHIVES 2010 / La casa de la fuerza

The House of the Strength is the place of every contrast. The little girl who, at the beginning, crosses the stage onboard her little pink airplane sets the tone when she reads these few words: "No mountain, no forest, no desert can deliver us from the evil that the others hatch for us." The latest piece of Angélica Liddell is a show in pink and black, in which pink is also the colour of mourning. Six women (three first, then three others) inhabit the stage to recount the difficulty of being a woman when the relationship with the other becomes a power play, daily humiliation, cruelty. The three women - or the three sisters - dream of leaving for Mexico. But there, the violence is horror on a large scale. A word has even been adopted there to designate the murders of women who, since the beginning of the 1990s, have been counted by the hundreds in the city of Ciudad Juárez in the state of Chihuahua, on the US border: "feminicide". While they drink, smoke, sing and dance, we guess at their internal suffering. The mariachis give way to a cellist striking up Vivaldi's Cum dederit. Dance gives way to other physical practices that exhaust the body, convulse it, mark it, make it bleed, both literally and figuratively. The women talk about themselves, they tell their own stories without any masks. And the private confessions alternate with cries of pain or anger. "In The House of the Strength, the challenge is to outlive myself," Angélica Liddell explains. "No meditation, no character. Nothing but the pornography of the soul." And the solitude, still and ever, regardless of the speaker. CV